Basic plan

View notifications

Get an email when someone opens one of your documents.

View notifications email you when a reader opens a document you have shared, at most once per hour per document. The setting is per document, not account-wide.

Enable notifications for a document

View notifications are a Basic plan feature and above. To turn them on:

  1. Open the document's Configure & Share page
  2. Open the Privacy & Access panel
  3. Tick Email Me When Viewed
  4. Save your changes

Free accounts cannot enable the setting — the server rejects the change with HTTP 403. The plan is also re-checked when a notification is about to be sent, so a downgrade to free stops the emails on documents where the setting is still on.

What the notification contains

When someone opens your document, you receive an email with:

  • The name of your PDF
  • Who opened it — their email address if one was captured for that session by the email gate, the lead-capture form, or an email invite; otherwise "A reader"
  • How the reader arrived: link, qr, email, or embed
  • A link to that document's readership page

Throttling: one email per hour per document

To prevent inbox flooding when a popular document gets many readers at once, notifications are throttled to at most one email per document per hour. The window is per document, not per reader or per link variant: every reader of the same document draws on the same hourly allowance.

The clock starts when a notification is sent, and only when one is sent — suppressed opens do not extend it. If your document receives five opens in 45 minutes and then another open 20 minutes later, you receive two emails: one triggered by the first of those five opens, and one triggered by the reader at 65 minutes. The four suppressed opens are not summarized in either email; they are only visible in the readership reports.

The throttle is a single conditional database update that stamps the last-notified time and reports whether it succeeded, so concurrent opens race for one claim and exactly one wins. There is no window in which two readers can both trigger an email. The claim is consumed at that moment, before the email is handed to the mail provider, so a delivery failure is not retried and still uses up the hour.

Your own views don't trigger notifications

A visit is compared against the document's owner before any notification is considered, so opening your own document never emails you and never consumes the hourly window. The comparison is made against the account signed in for that request: opening your own link while signed out — in a private window, or on another device — is indistinguishable from a reader's visit and does notify you.

Turn off notifications

Untick Email Me When Viewed in the same Privacy & Access panel and save. Future opens stop sending email immediately.

For more granular controls

View notifications are throttled and email-only. If you need unthrottled alerts routed to Slack, Zapier, Make, n8n, or any other system, use webhooks, which are available on all EveryPage plans and deliver one file.viewed event per reading session.

View notifications are separate from two other alerting features:

  • Comment notifications — Pro feature. Get an email when a reader adds a comment to your document. See Comments.
  • Read receipts — Basic+ feature. Request confirmation from readers that they've seen your document. See Read receipts.