Email Notification Sounds Complaint

We occasionally get a user requesting not to send email notifications at night because the alert sound disrupts their sleep. This request is rare (in 20+ years, mabye a dozen users out of hundreds of thousands), but worth advising on here.

Having a sound play on your device to notify you of an incoming phone call or text message is common. But to have a sound play for an EMAIL arriving is exceedingly rare. It is similar to having an alarm in your house ring every time someone puts mail, flyers, or a newspaper in your home mail box.

Our system sends out many tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of notifications a day. We use a large and high-end third-party service to diligently send emails in carefully engineered staggered batches during the lowest internet traffic times through the night (as do the majority of bulk emailers). This is an internet business standard that we abide by. If we do not do this, client companies' email servers can get bogged down or our system emails could get flagged as 'SPAM' and blocked permanently. Both of these would be worse consequences for our clients.

SOLUTION: Advise the users to turn off sound notifications for emails.

If for some reason they do want their email to make a sound, then they can use the 'Do Not Disturb' and/or 'Sleep Schedule' feature on their mobile device or computer (if their computer is nearby and left on while they sleep).

The 'Do Not Disturb' feature is common on both iOS and Android devices as per the example shown here: