I still don’t know why the new Google Docs doesn’t allow us an easier way to turn off notifications.
Here’s the problem: If I write you a comment on your Doc and then you write me back, I get an email. Same thing happens if you “resolve” the comment (which means make it go away).
That’s a lot of emails. If I’m collaborating on a shared document, I don’t need a reminder every time someone else makes a change.
Sure, I can change my notification settings, but they’re not global. That means that I need to repeat the same step for every document I get.
This becomes a huge problem when you’re a teacher. One hundred students means 100 essays means 100 times to change my notification settings.
Worse yet, notification settings (as far as I can tell) are per document per user. That means I can tell my students to turn off their notification settings, but that does nothing for me. I have to do the same thing with the same document.
I’d much rather have the default as “all notifications off except @ mentions.” This would mean that a student could send me an email by tagging me in a comment.
Otherwise, it’s going to be a long year remembering to turn off notifications or deleting the thousands of emails that indicate that students are reading my comments and making them disappear.
Update: Another problem is that I don’t think the @ mentions are working for me, either. So I get emails when I don’t want them, but I don’t get them when I do.
Dealing with this right now…I have to instruct EACH person collaborating with me on the document as to how to stop notifications from flooding their inbox.
It’s horrible, don’t you think? My answer was to create a filter so I don’t see them in my Gmail. Of course, this is not something my students will do, so they end up with tons of clutter in their inbox.