Help:Email notification

This is an information page. It is not a Wikipedia policy or guideline; rather, its purpose is to explain certain aspects of Wikipedia's norms or practices. It may reflect varying levels of consensus.

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Email notification is a feature of the MediaWiki software on which Wikipedia runs.^[1] It allows editors who have registered an account and provided an email address to receive automatic email notifications when their user talk page or other watchlisted page is changed, and when they receive alerts generated by the in-wiki notification system.

The feature is activated on the English-language version of Wikipedia (since May 2011 for the user talk^[2], April 2012 for the watchlist, and April 2013 for the in-wiki notification system^[3]). These can be set in the Email options part of the User Profile section and the Notifications section of your user preferences.

Emails are sent from wikiwikimedia.org.

The template {{Email user notification}} signals that you have email notification enabled. It produces the icon at the top right of this page.

Watched pages

Once you miss the email for a particular page change or don't visit the page (or ignore the email), you will not receive any more emails for that page. You can still dutifully monitor that page by its watchlist edit-summaries, but its particular email notification flag will remain unset until you visit it. This facilitates monitoring a large watchlist while preventing potentially useless emails to you.

In case you want to set all email notifications anyway, you can at any time mark all pages "visited". If the checkbox Preferences → Gadgets → Watchlist → Display pages on your watchlist that have changed since your last visit in bold is enabled, then your watchlist will have a button labeled "Mark all pages visited". That button will effectively set all of your email notification flags.

Talk page and other notifications

Email notifications are available for messages left on your user talk page, when you are mentioned or thanked, when someone links to or reviews a page you created, when someone changes your user rights, failed login attempts, successful logins from an unfamiliar device, and various other messages generated by the in-wiki notification tool.

The full list of messages can be configured on your Preferences → Notifications. You can enable (or disable) these notifications on the web or by email for most categories. You can also control how often to receive email notifications, from single emails for each event to daily or weekly digests.

Once a talk page notification has been sent, additional talk-page changes will not result in further notifications, until you have logged in and visited your talk page. Your own page changes do not trigger a notification.

For failed login attempts, multiple alerts are bundled into one for attempt from a new device. For a known device, you get one alert for every 5 attempts. Alerts notifying you of a successful login from a new device are only available by email.

Technical notes