Notifications and what you can turn off

Open Lance notifies you about things that happen on your account. You control most of it, and the controls are more granular than people expect.

Where the settings are

Under Notifications, then preferences. Everything is arranged as a grid of category against channel: for each kind of event, you choose which channels reach you.

The channels

In-app. The bell in the header. Always on, because it is simply the record of what happened on your account.

Email. To your registered address. The one people most want to tune.

Push, where available, to a browser or device you have allowed.

The categories

Notifications are grouped by what they are about, so you can be loud about the things that matter to you and quiet about the rest:

• Messages — someone wrote to you.
• Offers — an offer sent, accepted, declined or expiring.
• Contracts — a contract started, paused, ended.
• Milestones — work submitted, approved, a revision requested, a deadline approaching.
• Payments — money moved.
• Withdrawals — a payout requested, approved, completed or failed.
• Invitations — a client invited you to apply.
• Reviews — someone reviewed you.
• Search — a saved search matched something new.
• Support — activity on a ticket.
• Forum and Meetings, if you use them.
• System — account and security events.

What you cannot switch off

Some notifications are sent regardless of your settings, and it is worth knowing which and why.

Security events. A sign-in from a new device, a password change, an email change, two-factor being enabled or disabled. If someone gains access to your account, this email is how you find out. Making it optional would mean an attacker could switch it off.

Money movements that need your attention. A failed payment, a withdrawal that could not be sent, an escrow event that stops a contract.

Account status. A restriction, a verification outcome, an appeal decision.

Legal and terms changes where we are obliged to tell you.

Everything else is yours to configure.

Tuning it sensibly

The most common complaint is too much email, and the second most common is having missed something important. Both are solved by being deliberate rather than switching everything off.

Freelancers usually want email on messages, offers, invitations, milestones and payments. Search alerts are worth keeping if your saved searches are tight and worth muting if they are broad.

Clients usually want email on proposals, messages, milestones and payments, and rather less on the rest.

Everyone should keep email on payments and withdrawals. Money moving is worth an interruption.

If you are drowning, turn off categories rather than the channel. Switching email off entirely means you miss the offer.

If email has stopped arriving

Work through this in order:

Check spam or junk. Then mark the message as not spam, which teaches your provider.

Check your preferences — a category may be off.

Check your address is right under account settings. A typo in an address change is a common cause.

Check whether your address has bounced. If mail to you fails repeatedly, delivery is suspended automatically to protect our ability to send to anyone at all. A full mailbox or a temporarily broken server does this. Correcting the underlying problem and contacting support restores it.

Check your domain is not blocking us, which happens with some corporate mail filters. Ask your IT team to allow mail from our sending domain.

In-app notifications keep working regardless, so nothing is lost while email is being sorted out.

If you get notifications for something you did not do

Take it seriously and act immediately.

An email about a sign-in you do not recognise, a payment you did not make, or a password change you did not request means somebody may have access to your account.

1. Change your password now.
2. Turn on two-factor authentication if it is not already on. See Two-factor authentication.
3. Open a support ticket describing exactly what you received and when.

Do not click links in the suspicious message itself. Go to the site directly.

Notification emails and replies

Most notification emails are informational and replying to them does nothing useful.

The exception is support tickets: you can reply directly to a support email and it lands on the ticket. See Contacting support.

Messages from other users are best answered in the platform, so the conversation stays on the record where it protects both of you.

Push notifications

Where available, push delivers to a browser or device you have allowed. It is off until you permit it, and permission is granted per browser or device rather than per account.

It is the right channel for things that are time-sensitive — a message during an active engagement, work submitted for approval — and the wrong one for things that are not.

If push has stopped working, the usual cause is permission being revoked in the browser or operating system rather than anything on the platform. Check the site's notification permission in your browser settings first.

Choosing a setup that works

Rather than tuning every category, most people are well served by one of two patterns.

Everything that touches money and commitments, by email. Everything else, in-app only. So: offers, contracts, milestones, payments, withdrawals and messages by email; reviews, search alerts, forum and the rest in-app. This is the setup that means you never miss something that matters and are not interrupted by things that do not.

Everything in-app, with email only for money. For people who work in the platform daily and find email noise intolerable. The risk is missing an offer while you are away for a few days, so it suits people who check in most days.

Whichever you pick, keep security notifications on. Those are not optional anyway, and they are the ones you will be grateful for exactly once.

Digests and volume

If a category is genuinely too noisy, turning off its email while keeping it in-app is almost always better than turning it off entirely. The in-app record means the information is still there when you look for it; you simply stopped being interrupted by it.

The categories most people over-receive are search alerts, from saved searches that are too broad. Tightening the search is a better fix than muting the notifications, because a tight search that alerts you to three good matches a week is worth having.

Email that stops for a reason you cannot see

One case is worth calling out because it is invisible from your side.

If mail to your address fails repeatedly — a full mailbox, a server that rejects us, an address that no longer exists — sending to you is suspended automatically. This protects the deliverability of mail to everyone else, because a sender with a high failure rate gets treated as a spammer by every major provider.

The symptom is simple: everything works in the app and no email arrives, including ones you cannot switch off.

Fix the underlying problem, then contact support and ask for sending to be restored. It is not automatic, because the whole point is to stop sending to an address that has been failing.

What to do if you missed something important

If you missed an offer that expired, or a milestone that auto-approved while you were away, the notification settings are worth reviewing but so is the habit.

Both of those events carry warnings before they happen, and both are visible on your dashboard the whole time. The dashboard is the reliable channel — it does not depend on a mail server, a spam filter or a browser permission.

If you are going to be away for a period, it is worth checking active contracts before you go, because clocks continue running while you are not looking.

A note on timing

Notifications are sent when the event happens, not batched into a daily summary. For most things that is right — an offer arriving three hours late is worse than an interruption.

If the volume is uncomfortable, the fix is usually narrowing what you subscribe to rather than delaying it. Most people who feel overwhelmed are subscribed to a broad saved search or to a category they do not act on.

Notifications for a bidder

If somebody bids on your behalf, they receive notifications relevant to what they do, on their own account and to their own address. They do not receive yours, and they do not see your payment or withdrawal notifications.

Agree between you who watches what. The common arrangement is that the bidder watches for new work and early client contact, and you watch anything involving an offer or a contract.

One setting worth checking now

If you do nothing else with this article: check that email is on for payments, withdrawals, offers and messages.

Those four are the ones where a delay costs you something real — a missed offer that expired, a failed payment that paused a contract, a client waiting on a reply. Everything else can safely live in the app until you look.

Common questions

Can I turn off all email? Not entirely. Security and account-status messages are always sent, because an attacker being able to silence them would defeat the point.

Why did I get an email for a category I switched off? Check whether it was a security or money notification, which override preferences.

Can I change the address notifications go to without changing my login? No, they go to your account address. Changing it requires confirming both the old and the new one.

Do notifications differ per device? Push does, because permission is per browser or device. Email and in-app do not.

Related

• Contacting support
• Two-factor authentication
• Creating your account