Manage email notification for Chatter Group

Last Updated on April 15, 2019 by Rakesh Gupta

In Salesforce Chatter group represent group of users. It’s a great way to boost collaboration in your organization. We can add any number of users in Chatter group. Chatter can email you every time someone follows you, posts to your profile or groups etc. You can also receive daily or weekly Chatter group email digests for the group you are member of. To receive Chatter email notification and digests first of all administrator have to enable email notifications for your organization.

Enable Chatter notification for your organization

Once you enable Chatter for your org, next task is enable email notification for your organization. if you create new Salesforce org this feature is by default enabled. To enable Chatter email notification for your organization follow the below instructions

1) Click on Name | Setup | App Setup | Customize | Chatter | Email Settings
2) Select Allow Emails check box to enable email notification. This option allows user to configure the type and frequency of email notifications they want to receive.
3) If you want to allow users to reply to email notification about messages and comments via email instead of navigating to the comment or message in Chatter then select Allow Emails Replies .
4) If you want to allow users to post to groups using email then select Allow Posts via Email

5) Click on Save

Note:- To stop email notification for Chatter, deselect  Allow Emails check box.

In this article I will discuss various ways to manage Chatter group email notification.

Business Use case 1:- User Rakesh Gupta from Universal Container doesn’t want to receive email notification for the Chatter Group Help Desk.

Solution of above business requirement

To fulfill above requirement follow the below instructions.

1) Click on Name | Setup | Personal Information | My Chatter Settings | Chatter Email Settings
2) Navigate to Group Section, It will show all groups that you are member of, you can select  email notification frequency as per your choice, as shown in the below screenshot

3) Click on Save.

–>Another way is, You can directly navigate to the Chatter group for which you want to change email notification frequency and from the Chatter group page you can do these settings, as shown in the following Screenshot

Business Use case 2:- Higher management in Universal Container wants to daily digest all group members for  Chatter Group Help Desk because this is a very critical group where they are sharing all important information’s.

Solution of above business requirement

In above example you have to set email notification frequency for all group members for Chatter group Help Desk . As a system administrator the best way to do this is Data Loader. Before proceeding you have to understand CollaborationGroup and CollaborationGroupMember objects in Salesforce.

1. CollaborationGroup :- This object represents a Chatter group.

2. CollaborationGroupMember :- This object represent a member of a Chatter group. CollaborationGroupId represent Id of Chatter Group,  MemberId represent ID of the user(group member) and NotificationFrequency represent frequency at which Salesforce sends Chatter group email digests to this members. Possible options for NotificationFrequency are

D—Daily
W—Weekly
N—Never
P—On each post

Follow the below instruction to set email frequency for all users from data loader

1) Open Data Loader, click on export and login
2) Select Show all Salesforce objects check box,  select Group Member, choose a target for extraction and click on Next as shown in the below screenshot

3) Select Id,  NotificationFrequency and add condition where CollaborationGroupId equals to Chatter Group Help Desk ID, as shown in the below screenshot and click on Finish

4) Now open your .Csv file and edit column as NotificationFrequency  set it to D (D—Daily)  for all users , as shown in the following screenshot

5) Now we will perform Upsert operation using Data Loader with the object Group Member and click on Next as shown in the following screenshot

5) Map the fields and click on Next, as shown in the below screenshot

6) On the last Screen select location for Success and Error and click on Finish.

Few points to remember

1) Daily digests include the 50 latest posts from the previous day while weekly digests include the 50 latest posts from the week. Both include the three latest comments on each post.

2) The Email on Each Post option is disabled once a group exceeds 10,000 members. All members who had this option selected are automatically switched to Daily Digests.

3) Chatter sends daily digests at approximately 12:00 a.m. every day and weekly digests at approximately 12:00 a.m. on Sunday. For user digests the time is mentioned in user’s record.

4)Whenever you join or are added to a group, you don’t receive email notifications initially because they’re turned off by default. You can use Set default frequency for groups I join: to choose how often you want to receive emails when joining new groups. Changing the default frequency doesn’t affect the groups you already belong to.

5) When you like some post on Chatter then you will start receiving email notification for new comments on that post. To stop email notification  unlike the post.