Ask HN: Email alerts enabled or disabled for new users?

1 points by derricgilling 9 years ago | 1 comment

Ask HN: Email alerts enabled or disabled (i.e. require opt-in) for new users?

Background: We run an API monitoring and analytics tool called Moesif that can send email/Slack notifications if we see something wrong with your API such as high error rates.

Currently, we do not send alerts to the customer unless they manually go to our "Alert Settings" panel and enable email alerts. We could change it so that new users would automatically receive email alerts if something is wrong as soon as they integrate our SDK. Curious what developers on HN thinks about this for a good on boarding experience. Alerts was one of our most requested features so we just released them a few weeks ago, but we don't want to clutter people's email boxes if they don't want alerts.

mattbgates 9 years ago |

Disabled by default, but send a welcome email explaining to your users that they can enable this option to be alerted. For existing users, you can either send them an email or leave up a notification that they can close out, but read about those new changes. Depending on your app and if it is paid, you could also add in a text message feature, to be alerted.

Also give the option for a "per error" or "per error digest" and the digest will capture the last 10 errors and send them by email all at once. There could be some users who want to be alerted every time, but not giving them an option for anything else will make them not want to use it, so to at least be able to adjust the amount of emails is a far better option to get people actually using the feature.