Item update notifications (email and Slack)

Item updates are the messages Scout sends when something changes on work you hold or work you follow. They are separate from your morning brief: the brief is a scheduled summary, these are reactions to a change. You choose which changes reach you, on which channel, and how often.

Screenshot: Settings → Workspace → Notifications, the Item Updates card.

The two things you can be told about

Open Settings → Workspace → Notifications and find the Item Updates card — "Stay up to date on work assigned to you and items you follow." It is a small grid: one row per notification, a switch to turn that row on or off, then a tick box per channel — In App, Email and Slack.

The switch in the card header turns the whole group off in one move, without losing your per-row choices. The Slack boxes stay unavailable until you have linked and confirmed your own Slack account; hovering one explains that you link it from the Slack control in the Item Updates header.

What counts as a meaningful change

Scout does not message you every time it looks at an item. It notifies on five kinds of change:

• Evidence — new or changed proof behind the item.
• Ownership — the team or the person accountable changed, including the first time somebody is made accountable.
• Due date — the deadline moved.
• Lifecycle — the item closed, or its close reason changed. This is how you hear that Scout settled something on evidence, or that a colleague handled it.
• Notes — a close note or note revision was written.

Three rules are worth knowing because they surprise people:

• You are never notified about your own actions. The person who caused the change is left out of the recipients.
• Pressing Follow does not itself send you anything. It subscribes you to future changes.
• Being assigned something does not subscribe you to everything that happens to it afterwards. If you want to keep hearing about an item you have handed over or handed back, press Follow on it.
• Lapsing is silent. An item moving to the Lapsed shelf sends nobody a message; the shelf carries the count instead.

Timing and quiet hours

Below the grid, the Timing & Quiet Hours block has three fields.

Email cadence

• Instant — one email per update, as it happens. This is the default.
• Hourly digest — updates gathered and sent once an hour.
• Daily digest (7am) — one email a day.

Quiet hours

• Off — the default; updates go out whenever they happen.
• Evenings, 6 PM to 7 AM — updates wait for the morning.
• Evenings and weekends — updates also wait through Saturday and Sunday.

Time zone

Workspace default (which names the workspace's zone) or your own from the list. The note under the fields is exact about the scope of all this: quiet hours apply to item updates in that time zone, and your morning brief follows its own schedule.

Slack updates are always instant. The cadence choices apply to email only; quiet hours apply to both.

Saving, and the delivery status lines

Each group on the Notifications page has its own Save changes button, so saving your Item Updates choices does not touch your morning brief. While a save is in flight the fields go inert and the button reads Saving…. Your choices persist across updates to Scout.

Under the timing fields, Scout reports on your most recent update per channel in plain language — "Your latest email update was delivered", "Your latest Slack update is waiting for its delivery time", "Your latest email update failed; Scout will retry automatically" — with the timestamp. If a channel has been paused after a bounce or a spam complaint, it says that too, and says to contact your workspace administrator.

How Scout decides at the moment of sending

Eligibility is checked twice: once when the change happens, and again just before the message goes out. If by then you have unfollowed the item, lost visibility of it, been deactivated, had the assignment move to somebody else, or the item has changed again, the pending message is cancelled rather than sent. That is why an update you were expecting sometimes does not arrive — the reason for it stopped being true.

Each channel you have enabled delivers the same update once. A retry after a temporary failure is not a second notification, and a Slack message does not suppress the email or the other way round.

Good to know

• Turning every channel off is a legitimate setting. Your Inbox is unaffected — you simply come to Scout rather than Scout coming to you.
• Viewers may change their own notification preferences even though they cannot act on work.
• Administrators cannot see your private delivery history, and cannot set your preferences for you.
• If Slack updates are ticked but nothing arrives, start with the Slack delivery diagnostics on this same page.