Culling the GitHub notification spam

Long ago, I set up an email filter to make GitHub notifications skip my inbox. This made it easy to ignore the volume of irrelevant notifications that I was getting, and I only noticed them when they got in the way of a search for the one or two useful emails that GitHub sends.

However, it also means that I won’t find out if something legitimately notification-worthy happens, such as a new contributor opening a pull request to one of the handful of projects I actually care about.

Here are the steps one can take to improve that signal-to-noise ratio.

Quit Auto-Subscribing

Go to your notification settings and un-check the automatically watch repositories box.

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This will prevent you from automatically getting added to as a watcher to new repositories when you’re given access to them. It’s especially important to my GitHub workflow because I’m in several organizations that grant all members access to new repositories by default, and most of those repos are irrelevant to me.

Assess the Damage

Head over to the watching repos list to see how many repositories you’re automatically getting notifications for. In my case, there are too many to sort through by hand, so the best solution is going to be to bulk unsubscribe.

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Declare Notification Bankrupcy

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While you’re thinning your watch list, head on over to the notifications list and take action on any notifications that need it, or just use the magical Mark all as read button in the upper right.

It’s important to get rid of all the spurious notifications generated by repos you shouldn’t have been watching in the first place, so that in the future, having unread notifications will mean “something interesting happened” rather than “there’s still background noise”.

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Re-watch selectively

There are only about half a dozen repos where I need to take immediate action when an event such as a new PR occurrs.

For each such repo, switch your status to “watching” on its home page.

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Remove those email filters

The whole point of this exercise was to extract signal from the noise, and to complete that goal, we have to make the signal visible somewhere. For gmail, the filter ignoring everything from github will be somewhere in the filters list.

Maintenance

To keep seeing only the relevant notifications, respond to irrelevant notification emails by un-watching the repo that they came from.