A notification group bundles four things into one configurable unit: (1) the people / addresses who get alerted, (2) the webhook integrations that fire alongside, (3) the severity + event filters that decide whether any given incident matches, and (4) the monitor scope (all monitors on the account, or a hand-picked subset). Once a group exists, every monitor in scope routes through it automatically.

No. The moment you sign up, a Default group is created with your email pre-verified and 'all monitors' scope. So as soon as you add a monitor, incidents on that provider arrive in your inbox. Everything else (more recipients, webhooks, narrower scope, custom filters) is opt-in.

Yes. A group accepts any number of email recipients. Each recipient gets a one-click verification link the first time, plus their own unsubscribe link in every email — so a teammate can leave the group on their own without bothering whoever set it up.

Yes. Create a group with zero email recipients, attach a webhook integration, save. The group fires the webhook and skips email entirely. The reverse is also true — email-only with no integrations is the most common setup.

Yes — that's the point. The pattern that earns its keep: 'Critical' (major-severity-only, scoped to your top-3 dependencies, fires PagerDuty), 'Eng team' (everything but maintenance, scoped to the engineering surface, Slack webhook + a few engineer emails), and the auto-created Default (everything for everyone). Three groups, three different audiences.

All-monitors groups automatically cover every monitor on the account, now and in the future — add a new monitor and it lands in the group without extra clicks. Specific-monitor groups only fire for the subset you check off in the editor; new monitors don't auto-join. Default uses 'all'; tighter groups use 'specific'.

When you add a new email to a group, we send them a one-shot verification link. The recipient clicks it → their address flips to 'Verified' in the group editor → alerts start flowing. Until they verify, the row sits as 'Pending' and we don't send them alerts (so a typo'd address doesn't spam a stranger). Resend-verify is rate-limited to once per hour per recipient.

We send through Amazon SES with proper email signing from pingoru.io. Bounce and complaint signals from SES feed into a per-account suppression list automatically — bounced addresses stop receiving alerts so we don't burn down your domain reputation. Every email has a one-click unsubscribe link wired to the recipient ID, so leaving is friction-free.

Every webhook ships with an X-Pingoru-Signature-256 header — HMAC-SHA256 of the JSON body keyed by a secret we generate per integration. Verify it on your end to reject anything forged. The body has the incident, the monitor it tripped, and the provider it came from — see the deep-dive page for an example payload.

Dedup is automatic. Webhook deliveries are idempotent on (channel, event) — if a webhook is attached to two groups that both match an event, the delivery row is unique by event, so the URL gets called exactly once.