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When you create a workspace, Tallwatch automatically creates an email channel named Default Alerts seeded with your email address. Every member who joins the workspace later has their email appended. Every member who leaves has theirs removed. The point is to make sure a fresh workspace can deliver alerts from minute one without anyone having to configure a channel first. This page covers what the channel does, how it stays in sync, and how to opt out if you want to manage recipients manually.

What gets created

A single row in alert_channels:
FieldValue
NameDefault Alerts
Kindemail
Enabledtrue
Recipients[creator-email]
The channel is owner-scoped to the workspace and visible in Settings → Alerts → Channels. It looks identical to a manually-created email channel — there is no special badge.

How it stays in sync

1

On member join

Each time a user accepts an invite to the workspace, the channel hook appends their email to the channel’s recipient array. Idempotent: a duplicate invite cannot create a duplicate recipient.
2

On member leave

Each time a user leaves or is removed from the workspace, the hook prunes their email from the channel. The channel always reflects the current member list.
3

On rename

The sync stops the moment you rename the channel to anything other than Default Alerts. Renaming is the documented opt-out signal — see below.

How to opt out

You have three ways to stop the auto-sync:

Rename it

Change Default Alerts to anything else. The sync hook keys on the exact name, so the channel becomes a normal manually-managed email channel from that moment.

Disable it

Flip the Enabled toggle off. The channel stays in your workspace and keeps auto-syncing recipients, but the dispatcher skips it. Useful if you want to keep the recipient list correct for future re-enable.

Delete it

Delete the channel outright. New members no longer get auto-added. If you ever want it back, you’ll need to recreate it manually with the same name (the workspace hook fires only on workspace creation, not on demand).

When you might want to opt out

The default channel is convenient for small teams (under ten people) where every member should see every alert. Bigger teams usually outgrow it for one of these reasons:
  • Noise. Every alert hitting every member’s inbox is fine at three people. At thirty it is unread by default.
  • Per-monitor routing. You want billing monitors to alert billing engineers, not the entire team. Use a dedicated email channel per audience and bind it via an escalation policy.
  • Off-hours rotation. The team channel goes silent at night; only on-call gets paged. Move to a PagerDuty channel for that hand-off.
In all three cases, rename the Default Alerts channel and build the channels you actually want alongside it.

What the alert looks like

A standard incident-opened email. The body summarises the monitor name, the regions that detected the failure, the consensus window, and a deep link back to the incident in the dashboard. The List-Unsubscribe header is set so an inbox provider can offer a one-click unsubscribe — though for transactional alerts most providers leave the message in place.
Tallwatch will not bcc the channel’s recipients to obscure who else received the alert. Every recipient is in the to list of a single send. Resend (our email provider) delivers it as one outbound message regardless of recipient count.

What if I never want this auto-create?

There is no workspace-level setting to disable the hook yet. The workaround is to delete the channel immediately after workspace creation. We are tracking the feature request — file an issue if you want it prioritised.

Why this exists

Without the default channel, a brand-new workspace has zero channels configured. A monitor without an escalation policy falls back to “fan out to every enabled channel”, which means it falls back to nobody. The first time a real incident fires, no email goes out — and the user concludes the product is broken. The auto-created channel removes that failure mode. Every new workspace starts in a known-good state and can be refined later.