Tracking email notifications sent by Docebo (notification log)

That’s a great workaround. Thank you for that tip. I will get that implemented.

Regards,

Cheryl

Someone should tell Docebo support this workaround… I just asked them this question last week and they weren’t aware of it.

Hi @keiishida thanks for letting us know. We’ll bring it up to support. Have a great day! 

I cc myself on all notifications - my company is under 300 people so it is not bad and it let’s me know they are going out.  I like seeing them in my inbox to know people are engaging in the platform as well.

I use this feature and it is so handy.

In the helpdesk I look after when people say “I was never told about this course” or similar, searching the email trail and then letting them know it might be in a spam folder, or yes the system didn’t send you an email this time (my bad) is really handy for problem solving.

I also use the email account as a way of gauging activity on the system with people enrolling, course reminders etc.. which was an added bonus. 

We use this to solve your problem as well. It’s worked well for us. 

pmo wrote:

Hi Cheryl, 

There’s not a notification log that’s exposed to customers but what you can do is add an email to be cc’d on all email notifications sent by the platform. Some clients have created unique email addresses for this specific purpose so that they can login to those accounts and search for whatever notifications were sent by the platform. If that’s not feasible you could cc a personal account and create a filter that filters all of those emails into a folder that you can review. 
 

 

Do you know if that field (or another method) will allow you to send those CCs to more than one address? Our platform has Extended Enterprise, so we’d want emails to go to each specific domain under the EE.

@willingworth Nope...only one address. And no option to BCC.

willingworth wrote:

pmo wrote:

Hi Cheryl, 

There’s not a notification log that’s exposed to customers but what you can do is add an email to be cc’d on all email notifications sent by the platform. Some clients have created unique email addresses for this specific purpose so that they can login to those accounts and search for whatever notifications were sent by the platform. If that’s not feasible you could cc a personal account and create a filter that filters all of those emails into a folder that you can review. 
 

 

Do you know if that field (or another method) will allow you to send those CCs to more than one address? Our platform has Extended Enterprise, so we’d want emails to go to each specific domain under the EE.

Wonder if you could accomplish the same end result within your mail client though - for example, the cc from Docebo is abc-notifications@whatever.com. Then configure that mailbox to auto-forward to any number of other addresses…?

This is impractical when you have thousands of notifications going out.

I’ve been using this for a while now and have really adapted. A searchable Google Inbox with labels and auto-forwarding really is more powerful than Docebo’s internal features for emails/notifications. Would love more internal control, but I’ll take my system in Google now over not having any at all.

Hi Randallism sorry to hear it’s not meeting your needs. Can you give some feedback on what issue it creates for you at scale?

A lot of clients create a specific inbox to catch these. 

I used this kind of solution (CCing all emails to a Do Not Reply inbox)  with a different system.  It worked well while I was trying to better understand exactly what triggered an email and ensuring that the wording of the email made sense in context to the trigger. However, in that system I could control which emails were CCed.  I work at a company that utilizes ILTs and also has Extended Enterprise, so the volume of emails will be significant.

The issue it creates at scale is that I don’t need or want to generate that many emails in a CC box.  I would like to be able to determine which emails have a CC on them.  It is just a lot of wasted space on the server. I don’t need to know that a session is starting, but my learners do. I don’t need to know that a session was created, but the learners do.  I do need to know that a learner was informed that they were still showing as incomplete for HIPAA training, and later that the learner’s manager was informed that they were not in compliance with the completion of required HIPAA training.

I  hope this helps.

Side note: A good practice if you are going to have emails CCed into a box is to give each ‘type’ of email (combo of trigger for a collection of courses/LP etc) an identifier for that email.  That way if you do need to search an inbox you can put in the ID and all the emails that have that same ID will result. For example, if you have certain emails used for compliance courses and you need to pull up proof that a person was reminded relative to their enrollment date that they had to take training.

I get copied on every notification sent to our users.  It comes in handy as well.  I set a rule in Outlook to place in a specific folder. I do refer to them quite frequently when users say  they didn’t get it.  Most of the time, they miss it.

A BCC option would ideal. 

We’ve been using the documented option of a CC inbox. The problem this creates for us now, is that the CC inbox limits how many emails we can actually see during any given hour. For example, our email provider limits us to 1,000 emails that can be CC’d and show up in our inbox. If we were a small company that would be fine, but when we release a course to 5,000 employees our CC’d inbox will now only catch the first 1,000 emails that go out. Itd be nice if Docebo had a better option here

We are in a compliance audit right now and we need to be able to prove that specific employees got the notifications of courses being assigned and coming due. We are going to take a hit on that, I’m sure. When you cc yourself, does it happen to show you everyone who was sent the notification?

@KatieD it is a true CC (not BCC) so you will see the sender, recipient, and the CCd account. The CCd account will get a copy of every single notification the platform sends to people so you’ll be able to search the inbox if you need to verify a specific person received it.

The recipient will also see the CC so I recommend using a service account instead of a person for the CC so your inbox isn’t filled with copies of notifications and you don’t get the rare question from someone who replies to a notification.

As others have mentioned, this is simply a CC not a BCC, so it is a workaround, but not a true solution.  It is too easy for the user to click reply.  There really needs to be a BCC option.  In addition, there really should simply be a searchable email log in the system, showing what emails have been sent.  There should also be an option to see any email failures, such as bounces, invalid email address, or email servers not accepting the email.  This can help with compliance as well as user complaints that “I didn’t receive the email.”  Previous systems I have used allowed me to view the log, search, and even download a message to show that we did send the notification out.

This has been discussed for 2+ years now.  It would be great if Docebo would engage and consider this.

Same.  My inbox is constantly going over the limit and it just stops receiving any incoming emails.  It’s really frustrating. Even setting up rules and folders, it still maxes out the email storage limits fairly quickly.  

Unfortunately, our IT team has confirmed that we cannot rely on CC’ing every notification from Docebo as a solution for tracking whether a notification has gone out. Our Microsoft information security settings only allow a maximum of 30 emails to a recipient from a single sender per minute; this is a hard limit and cannot be adjusted.

If all of these emails being sent from Docebo are CCing the same address, it sees this as a possible attack coming from one sender so many times. Other mass company emails go to a Group address to each individual member 1x so it sees it as receiving one email per recipient. This sees the Docebo CC email as mass similar emails from one sender to one mailbox, so it is a different scenario.

Is there a way to slow down the notifications so that they are not at 30/minute?

I’ve put an idea into the portal here: Tracker for notifications | Community (docebo.com) I am getting quite frustrated with this at the moment. 

Does the cc option also work for users that click the “forgot password” email? that is probably the most consistently “not received” notification according to our users so curious if we added the cc if we would have visibility into those or is it only notifications we configure in the notification area of our instance? thanks.

@lexiemilford5 - all configured notifications and I think error logs for background jobs and emails from scheduled reports will get sent.  But emails from the forgetten password don’t seem to be cc’d. I wish it were so, because this is common issue we get contacted on and there is no way for us to verify if an email was sent.