Email and big rules
Every watch can mean email. The app shows you how much before you save, and makes you confirm big rules twice.
The email estimate
Before a rule is saved, the preview shows:
- how many people will start watching how many pages or spaces, and
- about how many notification emails a week that means.
The estimate comes from the last 30 days of edits to those pages. Confluence's default is one summary email a day, so each person gets at most seven a week however many pages they watch. If anyone has switched to instant emails, they get one per edit, and the preview shows that worst case too. It's a guide, not a promise: a busy week sends more.
The big-rule guard
If a rule would add more watches, or send more email, than your limits, you have to confirm a second time by typing the number. Defaults:
| Limit | Default |
|---|---|
| New watches in one rule | 1,000 |
| Emails a week | 5,000 |
Change them in Settings. The guard is there to stop a slip of the mouse from emailing the whole company.
The size cap
Each rule can cover at most 50,000 person-page pairs. That's people × pages: 500 people × 100 pages is 50,000; 2,000 people × 25 pages is 50,000. Rules over the cap can't be saved and won't sync.
This cap can't be changed. Confluence limits how fast any app can make changes, and a rule bigger than this would take days to set up and slow every other rule.
If you hit it:
- Make the group watch the whole space instead. That's one watch per person, however many pages the space has.
- Or use a smaller group, or a smaller page tree.
Setting up big rules takes time
A large new rule is worked through in batches, so the first sync can take a while. The rules list shows Syncing until it's done. Later syncs only handle changes, so they're quick.