Notifications and email
Where in-app notifications come from, how they reach the browser, which emails exist, how preferences apply, and what Slack does and does not do.
Summary
- An in-app notification has a type of info, warning, error, or success. Noru creates them for job events and owner assignments, and the browser receives new ones live over a server connection that reconnects on its own.
- Email covers onboarding, tasks, training, vendor questionnaires, and account lifecycle. Five preference categories, all on by default, decide whether a Noru user receives them; addresses that are not Noru users always do.
- Slack is a two-way, read-only assistant (mentions and
/noru), not a notification channel. Nothing is pushed to Slack.
Concepts
| Field | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Type | Info, Warning, Error, or Success; drives the badge colour |
| Link | Where View details goes, for example the record that was assigned or the job that ran |
| Read | Cleared one at a time or with Mark all as read |
| Email category | Tasks, Training, Vendor questionnaires, Lifecycle and billing, or Welcome emails; one toggle each on your account page |
How it works
What creates a notification
| Event | Recipient | Type |
|---|---|---|
| Job started, when you started it | You | Info |
| Job finished | The user who started it; nobody for system-scheduled jobs | Success |
| Job failed | The user who started it, or every organization admin when nobody did | Error, with the job name and error text |
| Owner assigned on a policy, risk, risk treatment, or control | The new owner | Info |
An owner-assignment notification is skipped when the owner is unchanged or cleared, and a failure to create one never blocks the assignment itself. A failed job notifies on every failed attempt, including attempts that are retried automatically, so one job can produce several failure notices.
Live delivery
The notifications modal holds a server connection that pushes unread notifications as they are created and shows a green Live dot while it is up. The connection is rotated on purpose at regular intervals and reconnects with backoff; a flicker of the dot is normal and loses nothing, because notifications are stored and fetched again on reconnect. After repeated failures the header reads Offline and a page reload resets it. The badge on your avatar shows the unread count.
All email is sent from noreply@notifications.noru.tech; allow that address if your mail gateway filters unknown senders.
| Trigger | Category | |
|---|---|---|
| Welcome | Daily, to users created in the last 7 days | Welcome emails |
| Task notification | Daily, for newly assigned tasks | Tasks |
| Training invite, training reminder | Sending a training campaign, and its reminders | Training |
| Vendor questionnaire invitation | Assigning a questionnaire with recipients | Vendor questionnaires |
| Vendor questionnaire clarification | Clicking Clarify in the review dialog | Vendor questionnaires |
| Account lifecycle notices | A daily check of the organization's account state | Lifecycle and billing |
| Trust certificate delivery | Requesting a certificate from a public trust page | None; always sent |
Email sends are retried automatically on delivery errors.
Preferences
Each user holds five toggles, all on by default, under Email notifications on the account page. They are per user across every organization you belong to, not per organization. Every sender checks the category before sending: the task email checks Tasks, training delivery checks Training, questionnaire invitations and clarifications check Vendor questionnaires, and the lifecycle emails check Lifecycle and billing. When a recipient is identified only by email address, the address is matched to a Noru user first; an address that belongs to no Noru user, such as a vendor contact, is always sent.
Slack
Connecting Slack under Settings → Integrations installs a bot that answers @Noru mentions and /noru slash commands by reading your controls, frameworks, and risks, and posts the answer back to the same channel. That is the only outbound Slack path. Answers are read-only summaries visible to everyone in the channel; see the permissions the app asks for under Integrations.
What is not notified
- In-app notifications are never emailed, and there is no digest of them.
- Successful system-scheduled jobs (daily sweeps, scheduled syncs) notify nobody.
- Owner changes on entities other than policies, risks, treatments, and controls.
- Vendor contacts have no preferences; they always receive questionnaire mail.
- Slack receives no proactive alerts, and there are no browser or mobile push notifications.
Edge cases and failure modes
- Retries multiply failure notices. A job that is retried several times can produce one error notification per attempt.
- Admins get system failures. Failures of jobs nobody started go to every admin of the organization.
- Bursts are delivered in batches. Under a burst, only the newest unread notifications are pushed at once; the rest follow moments later or appear in the list.
- Unknown addresses always receive mail. Preferences only apply to addresses that match a Noru user, so a colleague invited under a second address is not covered by their toggles.
- Clarify emails everyone listed. A clarification goes to every recipient on the assignment, not only the person who answered.
What you can influence
- Your five email categories on the account page.
- Which contacts are listed when assigning a questionnaire, and therefore who receives invitations and clarifications.
- Who owns a policy, risk, treatment, or control, and therefore who is notified.
- Whether Slash Commands and Bot Mentions are enabled for Slack, and which channel the app is in.
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