I just spent several hours troubleshooting what I thought were broken email notifications, only to stumble across a forum post that explained:
“You won’t receive any notifications for your modifications in Kanboard. The system just notifies you if other users changes content that concerns your account.”
If that is correct I genuinely had no idea this was how it worked. The documentation at https://docs.kanboard.org/v1/user/notifications/ doesn’t mention this anywhere. In fact it hints at you actually getting notifications.
Why this was so frustrating:
When notifications didn’t trigger, I naturally assumed something was broken. I spent the afternoon:
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Reconfiguring SMTP settings (switched ports, tested encryption)
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Manually running cron jobs
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Checking database tables for orphaned plugin data (Mailmagik was installed and then removed)
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Digging through debug logs for errors
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Generally questioning whether I’d misconfigured the entire system
All of this because the actual behavior just wasn’t documented.
The use case you might be missing:
I get that you probably don’t want to spam users with emails about their own changes - that makes sense for teams. But a lot of us work solo or actually WANT those self-notifications because:
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We’re not looking at Kanboard constantly
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Email reminders help us schedule follow-ups
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We use email as our primary notification hub
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It integrates with calendars and other systems
Simple documentation fix:
Could you add a note to the notifications page explaining this behavior? Something like:
“Note: You will only receive notifications when other users modify tasks that involve you. Kanboard does not send notifications for your own actions to avoid unnecessary emails.”
That one paragraph would have saved me (and probably others) a lot of confusion.
Feature suggestion:
If it’s not too complex, an optional “Notify me about my own actions” checkbox might be useful for solo users or people who want email-based task tracking.