How do I send mention notification emails?

To send mention notification emails, your app usually needs to do two things:

1. Detect the mention in whatever content is being posted.
2. Send an email to the mentioned user(s) when the post is saved.

A typical flow looks like this:

1) Detect mentions

When a user writes something like:

Hey @alice, can you review this?

Parse the text for @username patterns, then look up matching users in your database.

Example logic:

• Extract alice
• Find user record for alice
• Check whether the user has notifications enabled

2) Create a notification record

Before sending the email, it’s best to store a notification in your database so you can:

• prevent duplicates
• show in-app notifications
• retry email delivery if needed

Example fields:

• recipient_user_id
• actor_user_id
• post_id
• type: mention
• read_at
• created_at

3) Send the email

Use your email provider or mail library to send a notification email.

Email content usually includes:

• who mentioned them
• the post/comment content
• a link to view it
• an unsubscribe or notification settings link

Example subject:

You were mentioned by John

Example body:

John mentioned you in a comment:

"Hey @alice, can you review this?"

View it here: https://yourapp.com/posts/123

4) Do it asynchronously

Mention emails should usually be sent in a background job/queue rather than during the request, so posting stays fast.

Examples:

• Sidekiq / Celery / BullMQ / Delayed Job
• Cron worker or task queue

5) Avoid spam and duplicates

Best practices:

• Don’t email the same user multiple times for repeated mentions in one post
• Respect user notification preferences
• Rate limit emails
• Don’t send if the user mentioned themselves
• Consider batching if many mentions happen at once

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Minimal implementation outline

Pseudocode

def create_post(author, content):
    post = save_post(author, content)
    usernames = extract_mentions(content)

    for username in set(usernames):
        user = find_user_by_username(username)
        if user and user.wants_mention_emails:
            create_notification(user, post, author)
            queue_email(user.email, post, author)

    return post

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If you’re using a specific stack

I can give you exact code for:

• Ruby on Rails
• Django
• Node.js / Express
• Laravel
• ASP.NET
• React + backend
• SendGrid / Mailgun / SES / SMTP

If you want, tell me your stack and I’ll show a concrete example.