Bitbucket pull request notifications, and when they do not arrive
Bitbucket tells you about a pull request by email and, on Bitbucket Cloud, also under the bell icon. Below is where the settings are, who gets which notification, and what to check when one does not come, from Atlassian's Manage email notifications for watched objects, View your notifications and Email notifications not working in Bitbucket Cloud (Cloud), and Notifications and Pull request notifications (Data Center).
Bitbucket Cloud
- The switches: the Settings cog, Personal Bitbucket settings, then Notifications under General. There you enable or disable email notifications and in-app notifications. While email is disabled, the Email me about settings are not available.
- What you watch: email follows what you watch. Bitbucket watches for you the repositories and pull requests you create, and the pull requests you comment on. To watch every pull request of a repository, open the repository's ... menu, choose Manage notifications and tick Pull requests; for one pull request, use Watch in its ... menu. A mention in a comment, or a change to your access, is sent even when you unsubscribed.
- The bell (in-app notifications) lists comments, requested changes, approvals, merges, declines, an added reviewer, mentions of you, and nudges (where nudging is turned on), on pull requests. It leaves out what reaches you only because you watch the pull request, and drops a notification after 30 days.
When the emails do not come:
- Email is turned on (the Notifications page offers Disable email notifications, not Enable), and you watch the pull request or the repository (Manage next to Open pull requests, under Notifications: a solid eye means watched).
- The emails go only to your account's primary address.
- An email larger than 6 MB is not delivered, for example after a very long pull request description or comment.
- Your mail server lets Bitbucket's senders through:
notifications-noreply@bitbucket.org,no-reply@atlassian.comandnoreply@mailer.atlassian.com. Atlassian's own suppression list can also hold an address back.
Bitbucket Data Center
- The switches: Manage account, then the Notification settings tab. You pick which groups of events you get (state changes, code changes, comments and tasks added, mentions of me), separately for pull requests you author and those you review or take part in. Everyone starts subscribed to all of them.
- Who gets them: the author, the reviewers and the watchers. The author and the reviewers watch a pull request from the start, and anyone who comments, approves, merges, declines, reopens or pushes to its branch joins them. You get nothing for what you did yourself.
- Batched by default: Bitbucket gathers each person's notifications for a pull request into one email, sent after 10 quiet minutes or when the oldest is 30 minutes old, whichever comes first. You can switch to immediate on the Notification settings tab, separately for pull requests and repositories; an admin can change the two times, or make the whole server immediate.
- Sent at once anyway: to the reviewers when a pull request is opened (or a draft gets reviewers), to a reviewer when added or removed, to someone mentioned in the description, and to all watchers when a pull request is deleted.
- No mail server, no email: an admin has to set up the mail server, and when it fails, the notifications are dropped.
Review requests in IntelliJ IDEA
Pull Request Inbox for Bitbucket, a plugin by Lesstep for JetBrains IDEs 2024.1 or later, lists the Bitbucket Cloud and Bitbucket Data Center pull requests waiting for your review in an IDE tool window. While the tool window is open, it reads the list again every 5 minutes and shows an IDE notification for each new pull request that waits for you (you are a reviewer, have neither approved nor requested changes, and it is not a draft); Open selects it. It asks Bitbucket's REST API with your own token, so it does not depend on email, on watching, or on Data Center's batching. It tells you only about review requests: comments, approvals and merges still reach you through Bitbucket. Turn it off in Settings | Tools | Pull Request Inbox for Bitbucket. The review inbox and its notifications are free; approving, commenting, merging and the other actions are Pro, with a 30-day trial.
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