If you subscribe to a task you express that you are interested in receiving all updates about the task in order to closely follow its progress. So if you follow too many tasks you might want to decrease your interests a bit. :)

I can imagine that upstream maintainers would refuse this request to somehow "distinguish mentions from subscribers", as it might not be a "root problem" to solve.

When it comes to why this task was created, it looks like "too many notifications" is the underlying problem?

Maybe you want to be subscribed to less projects and tasks (or actively mass-unsubscribe from some), or fine-tune your mail notifications, or use web notifications for less important things and mail notifications for others.

@Elitre is currently subscribed to 1016 individual open tasks and a member of 33 projects. The latter means that by default you get notifications for all task changes associated to these projects if you have not explicitly clicked "Disable Mail". I am not sure if you really want that.

Related:

• "How to effectively manage Phabricator email notifications" upstream docs.
• "How to fix 'too much mail'" is a related discussion in upstream.

Related upstream tasks:

• https://secure.phabricator.com/T9031 "When I ignore subscription changes, I'm not notified of being cc'ed"
• https://secure.phabricator.com/T9412 "Annotate all the reasons that a user is included on the recipient list for mail"
• https://secure.phabricator.com/T4654 "Add 'always email me' type option for direct mentions, ccs, assignments, etc"

Even if I were following just 10 tasks, I'd still want the ability to tell whether I'm being pinged or the task is just part of the stuff I'm usually following, especially since both things can happen for a given task.

In T150766#2796808, @Quiddity wrote:

• https://secure.phabricator.com/T4654 "Add 'always email me' type option for direct mentions, ccs, assignments, etc"

Thanks for listing them. https://secure.phabricator.com/T6297#88557 also feels relevant - a custom mail header could include an additional "User has been mentioned when this comment got added" value.

In T150766#2798737, @Elitre wrote:

Even if I were following just 10 tasks, I'd still want the ability to tell whether I'm being pinged or the task is just part of the stuff I'm usually following, especially since both things can happen for a given task.

As I kept wondering why you do not plan to follow (means: "read") notifications from tasks that you decided to follow, I realized: Am I correct that a higher urgency is implied (and hence faster attention required) when being explicitly mentioned in a comment, compared to a task you "just follow" by being subscribed?

Edit: Note to myself: Yes. That's what Erica already wrote in the task description but in other words, Andre.

Use case: I write the technical newsletter for the Wikimedia wikis. This means I'm subscribed to a lot of tickets that would be difficult for me to unsubscribe from, because I'd miss when someone tells me "hey, this will go into production next week" or there's a relevant update. There's enough traffic that I miss some stuff, but I'd miss even more if I were subscribed to fewer tickets. If there was a custom mail header or at least anything, it'd help immensely.

(I've been able to mitigate most of this with various filters and other notifications, but the one thing that's really missing is something for being mentioned. There's no specific Phabricator setting for it and if you e.g. use Gmail (because you'd need to parse the entire email, which would be really slow in many clients but they do it anyway) the filter rule "Johan" is indistinguishable from the filter rule "@Johan". This is a problem in Gmail rather than in Phabricator, but if it had been solved in Phabricator there'd be need for a workaround from the very beginning.)

https://secure.phabricator.com/T4654#235478 implies that at some point the X-Phabricator-Mail-Stamps header will include mention(@username).
Also see https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T92860

Mail Stamps will soon be exposed in the body of messages, rather than only in the X-Phabricator-Mail-Stamps header. This should make it possible for gmail users to create a filter which matches any notification which @mentions their username. See https://secure.phabricator.com/w/changelog/2018.06/

In T150766#3971531, @mmodell wrote:

Mail Stamps will soon be exposed in the body of messages, rather than only in the X-Phabricator-Mail-Stamps header. This should make it possible for gmail users to create a filter which matches any notification which @mentions their username. See https://secure.phabricator.com/w/changelog/2018.06/

So when that happens, this task could be resolved?

Added a sentence to https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Phabricator%2FHelp&type=revision&diff=2715419&oldid=2708150

Also see https://secure.phabricator.com/w/changelog/2018.06/ for how to use that in broken software like "GMail".

I.e. for gmail, do this in phabricator:

and create a new filter in gmail, using "mention(@YOURNAME)"

which will result in (screenshot from test-instance):