Allow administrators to restrict which contacts will receive an email notification when an activity is assigned to a contact
How it works currently:
Administrators can only choose either to enable or disable sending email notifications (including a copy of the activity) when an activity is assigned to a contact OR limit it to specific types of activity.
https://dmaster.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/admin/setting/preferences/display?reset=1
Improvement
We would like to allow administrators to specify which groups of users would receive an email so that certain users can be assigned an activity, but they would not receive CiviCRM's default activity assignee email.
Note
Note, there is already some similar (but subtly different!) functionality on CiviCase for case activities:
The above restricts who can be selected to be assigned an activity, whereas we are specifying who would be sent a notification for an activity.
Proposed solution
We propose adding a new functionality that allows administrators to specify which CiviCRM groups would receive an email notifications. This can be achieved by introducing a new dropdown field.
We would create 2 new settings for this under the setting for "Do not notify assignees for" on the Display Preferences page: https://dmaster.demo.civicrm.org/civicrm/admin/setting/preferences/display?reset=1 which states:
- Restrict email recipients to groups
- (list all CiviCRM groups or smart groups)
- Multiselect
- Help: Limit which contacts will receive a CiviCRM activity notification email when an activity is assigned to them. You can select any group or smart group. Leave blank for no restriction. Note that you may still assign an activity to a contact who is not in the group, but they will not receive an email.
If the field is blank there will be no restriction. If a group is selected, emails will be restricted to only go to that group.
- Restrict email recipients to Website Users
- Checkbox
- Help: Limit which contacts will receive a CiviCRM activity notification email to only be those who have a CMS user when an activity is assigned to them. Note that you may still assign an activity to a contact who does not have a CMS user, but they will not receive an email.
Emails will be suppressed in each case.
Next steps
We are prepared to submit a pull request (PR) for this feature. If the concept is approved, we will promptly submit the core PR.
Thank you.