Notifications

Rally does not ping you about everything. It notifies you in exactly two situations:

• Someone @mentions you in a Channel or a Breakout.
• Someone adds you to a Channel. (If you created the Channel yourself, Rally assumes you already know.)

That is the whole list. Rally finishing a job, a teammate posting, a Sidekick running: none of those send you a notification. For those, look at the status dots in the app, or let the digest round them up for you.

How a notification reaches you#

Rally tries the quickest route it has for you, in this order:

1. Slack. If Rally is installed in your Slack workspace, you get a direct message from the Rally bot, such as “Sam mentioned you in ‘Q3 plan’” or “Sam added you to ‘Q3 plan’”, with an Open in Rally link.
2. Your Mac and iPhone. If you have turned on notifications on a Mac or an iPhone, it gets an alert as well. One mention can reach Slack and your phone at the same time.
3. Email, as a last resort. Only if neither Slack nor a device took the notification, Rally emails you from Rally notifications@rallywith.ai, with a subject such as "Sam mentioned you in Q3 plan" and an Open in Rally link. You can reply to that email to post into the Channel, as Email into Rally explains.

For Slack, Rally sends the message to the Slack account you linked with Connect Rally (see Rally in Slack). If you have not linked one, Rally looks for a single Slack account whose email address exactly matches your Rally sign-in. If it finds none, or more than one, you get email instead. Linking your account removes the guesswork.

Notification text is plain: formatting is removed and mentions appear as @Name.

Notifications on your Mac#

Open Settings → Notifications. Under On this Mac there is one switch: Notify me about mentions and additions. It is on unless you turn it off.

• Alerts arrive even when Rally is closed.
• Click an alert and Rally opens the exact Channel or Breakout it is about.
• Alerts are grouped by Channel, with its Breakouts in the same group, so one busy Channel does not bury the rest.
• The first time, macOS asks whether Rally may send notifications. If you said no, the settings page says Notifications are turned off in macOS. with an Open System Settings button to change your mind.

If you cannot find Notifications in Settings at all, notifications have not been switched on for your account yet. Your teammates will have to keep mentioning you the old-fashioned way, loudly, across the office.

The number on the app icon#

Rally's icon in the Dock carries a badge: the number of Channels in your Organization that are unread or waiting for your input. Each Channel counts once, however many messages it has. If you belong to several Organizations, the badge shows the count for whichever one notified you most recently, not a total.

Notifications on your iPhone#

The iPhone app sends the same alerts. Tap your avatar at the top left of the Channels tab to open Settings, and use Notify me on this iPhone about mentions and additions under Notifications. Tap an alert and the app opens that Channel or Breakout.

If you turned notifications off for Rally in iOS, the switch says Notifications are turned off in iOS Settings. with an Open Settings button.

The small print#

• Turning the switch off, or refusing permission, takes that device off the list, so Rally can fall back to email for you instead.
• Signing out of Rally on a Mac stops notifications to that Mac.
• If your device is off or offline, Apple holds alerts for up to 24 hours.
• Now and then the same alert can arrive twice. Rally would rather tell you twice than not at all.
• There is no setting to choose between mentions and additions. You get both or, by turning the switches off, neither.

Notifications and the digest#

Notifications are for the things aimed at you, the moment they happen. The digest, on the next page, covers everything else: a written summary of what moved, on the days and at the times you choose. Most people keep both, notifications for "come here now" and the digest for "here is what you missed".