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When you create a workspace, Tallwatch creates an email channel called Default Alerts seeded with your email. As people join, their email is added; as they leave, it’s removed. The goal is simple: a fresh workspace can deliver an alert from minute one, before anyone configures anything. This page covers what the channel does, how it stays in sync, and how to take it over manually.

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What gets created

One row in alert_channels: It lives in Settings → Alerts → Channels and looks exactly like a hand-made email channel. There’s no special badge.

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How it stays in sync

The sync is driven by organization hooks, keyed on the exact name Default Alerts.
1

A member joins

Their email is appended to the recipient list. The append is idempotent, so a duplicate invite can’t add a duplicate recipient.
2

A member leaves

Their email is pruned. The list always reflects the current roster.
3

You rename the channel

Sync stops the instant the name is anything other than Default Alerts. Renaming is the opt-out signal (see below).

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Take it over manually

Three ways to stop the auto-sync, depending on what you want:

Rename it

Change Default Alerts to anything else. The hook keys on the exact name, so from that moment it’s a normal, hand-managed email channel.

Disable it

Flip Enabled off. The channel stays and keeps syncing recipients, but the dispatcher skips it. Good if you want the list kept warm for a later re-enable.

Delete it

Remove it outright. New members stop getting added. The hook only fires on workspace creation, so getting it back means recreating an email channel yourself.

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When to outgrow it

Default Alerts is convenient for a small team where everyone should see everything. Larger teams usually move on for one of these reasons:
  • Noise. Every alert in every inbox is fine at three people. At thirty it’s unread by default.
  • Per-monitor routing. Billing monitors should reach billing engineers, not everyone. Use a dedicated email channel per audience, bound through an escalation policy.
  • Off-hours. The team feed goes quiet at night and only on-call should be paged. Hand that off to PagerDuty.
In each case, rename Default Alerts and build the channels you actually want next to it.

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What the alert looks like

A standard incident email. The body names the monitor, the regions that detected the failure, when it started, the last error and status code, and a deep link back to the incident. A List-Unsubscribe header (RFC 8058) is set so inbox providers can offer one-click unsubscribe, though most leave transactional alerts in place.
Recipients are not bcc’d. Everyone is in the to field of one Resend send, so each recipient can see who else got the alert. If you need to hide that, put those addresses on their own channel.

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Turning off the auto-create entirely

There’s no workspace setting for this yet. The workaround is to delete the channel right after creating the workspace. If you want a real toggle, open an issue and we’ll weigh it.

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Why it exists

Without it, a new workspace has zero channels. A monitor with no escalation policy falls back to “every enabled channel,” which falls back to nobody, so the first real incident sends no email and the product looks broken. The auto-created channel removes that trap: every workspace starts in a known-good state you can refine later.