Notifications

Hydra keeps you in the loop on conversations and teammate activity through two channels:

1. In-app bell — the bell icon in the top-right of every dashboard page. A red badge shows unread notifications; click it to open a drawer of recent items grouped by conversation.
2. Email — mention alerts arrive in your inbox so you don't have to be logged in to see them.

Each event type has its own delivery preferences, so you can be loud about the important things and quiet on the rest.

What triggers a notification

Two event types fire notifications today:

• @mention in an internal note on a conversation. When a teammate writes an internal note that includes @your-name, both you and any other mentioned teammates get a notification.
• SLA breach. When a conversation or ticket misses its first-response or resolution target, Hydra notifies the assignee (or all admins/owners if unassigned). See SLAs for how breach detection works and how the recipient is resolved.

More event types are on the roadmap — assignment, new conversation on a channel you're in, ticket reply — and each will get its own row in the preferences matrix when shipped.

The bell icon and drawer

The bell sits at the top-right of every dashboard page. The red badge counts unread notifications across your workspace.

Click the bell to open the drawer:

• Unread notifications are subtly highlighted purple.
• Click any row to mark it read and jump to the conversation it came from.
• Mark all read clears the badge in one click — useful after returning from a long break.
• Notification settings → at the bottom links to your preferences page.

The bell polls for new notifications every 30 seconds, so the badge updates without a page refresh.

Email alerts

When a notification arrives and your prefs allow email for that event type, Hydra sends a transactional email from noreply@hydra-help.com containing:

• Who mentioned you
• The note snippet (mentions flattened — no UUIDs in the email body)
• A button linking back to the conversation

Each notification triggers at most one email — Hydra tracks email_sent_at on the notification row, so a retried fan-out won't double-send.

If you don't want email alerts, switch them off in Settings → Notifications. The in-app bell will still update.

Managing your preferences

Go to Settings → Notifications. You'll see a matrix with one row per event type and one column per delivery channel (in-app, email). Toggle each switch independently:

• In-app bell — controls whether the event lands in your bell drawer and bumps the badge.
• Email — controls whether Hydra sends a transactional email.

Both default to on for every event type. Preferences are per-account — they only affect your notifications, not your teammates'.

Changes save instantly and apply to the next notification you'd otherwise receive.

Self-mentions

Hydra never notifies you when you mention yourself. The mention pill is also suppressed from your own dropdown of teammates, so accidental self-mentions are rare in practice.

Notification-less mentions

You'll occasionally see an @Name rendered as a styled pill in the conversation thread but no notification was sent. Two reasons this happens:

1. The mention was edited out before the note was saved. Notifications only fire when an internal note is saved with the mention still in it.
2. The mentioned teammate was not part of the tenant. Hydra rejects mentions whose admin id doesn't belong to your workspace, both for the notification fan-out and the email dispatch.

Coming soon

A daily digest option for notifications you'd rather batch, plus assignment / new-conversation / ticket-reply event rows. The matrix will grow new rows as those events ship — your existing preferences won't change.