Delivering notifications to a channel

A notification lands in the workspace inbox on its own. Getting it to Slack, to a mailbox, to a chat app on somebody’s phone — that is a route, and this page is the recipe for each destination.

The one thing to understand first

There is no list of supported notification channels, and no channel plugin. A route delivers by calling a tool on a connector the workspace already has.

That means the answer to “can it send to X?” is always the same question: is there a connector with a tool that sends to X? If yes, a route can use it today, and nothing in the platform needed to know about X in advance. If no, the answer is to add one — see when your channel is not here.

It also means the destination is only ever as good as the tool. The platform renders your template and makes the call; what happens after that belongs to the connector.

The shape of every route

Whatever the destination, you write the same three things under Settings → Notifications:

1. Match — which notifications this route is for.
2. Deliver to — a tool, picked from the ones this workspace has. Tool names are <connector>__<tool>, and the picker shows them that way.
3. Arguments — a JSON object matching that tool’s own input schema, with placeholders for the notification’s fields.

{
  "channel": "alerts",
  "markdown_text": "*{{title}}*\n{{body}}\n{{inbox.url}}"
}

Always include `{{inbox.url}}`

It is the only placeholder that produces a link a person can open from outside NimbleBrain. {{link.resource}} is whatever address the connector chose — usually an internal URI that the inbox can turn into a button and that Slack, email and chat apps render as unhelpful text.

{{inbox.url}} points at the item in your inbox, opened and expanded, with its body, the connector’s raw data and the delivery ledger. It is the difference between a message that reports something and one somebody can act on.

The arguments are the tool's, and nothing checks them for you

Saving a route checks that the tool exists in this workspace and that every {{…}} is one the platform resolves. It does not check your arguments against the tool’s schema — that schema belongs to the connector. A route with the wrong field name saves cleanly and fails on every delivery.

Send test is how you find that out in ten seconds instead of at three in the morning.

Slack

Install the Slack connector under Settings → Connectors, then connect the Slack account it asks for. Confirm it works — a connector can be installed and list its tools while the account behind it was never connected.

Deliver to	the Slack connector’s SLACK_SEND_MESSAGE
Arguments	channel, and one of markdown_text or blocks

{
  "channel": "alerts",
  "markdown_text": "*{{title}}*\n{{body}}\n{{inbox.url}}"
}

Notes worth having before you write it:

• The channel takes a name or an id, without the #. Use the id (C0ABC12345) for a private channel, or if your Slack is on Enterprise Grid, where name lookup fails. SLACK_LIST_ALL_CHANNELS finds ids.
• Invite the app to the channel. Slack refuses to post to a channel the app is not in, and the error says so.
• The message body field is markdown_text, not text. This is exactly the class of mistake the paragraph above warns about.
• Slack auto-links what looks like a URL or an address, so a title containing an email arrives with it linked. That is Slack, not the platform.

Microsoft Teams

Install the Teams connector and connect the account.

Deliver to	the connector’s send-message tool
Arguments	the target conversation or channel, and the message body

The shape is the same as Slack’s; only the field names differ. Read them off the tool in the Deliver to picker rather than assuming, then confirm with Send test.

Email

Two connectors send mail — Gmail and Outlook — and either works as a route target. Email suits notifications that need to reach somebody who is not in your chat tool, and it carries more text comfortably than a chat message.

Deliver to	the connector’s send-email tool
Arguments	recipient, subject, body

{
  "recipient": "ops@example.com",
  "subject": "{{title}}",
  "body": "{{body}}\n\nOpen it: {{inbox.url}}"
}

Mail is sent by the route's author

A route dispatches under whoever saved it, so mail sent this way comes from their mailbox, and the connector must be connected for them. See who a route runs as.

WhatsApp

Install the WhatsApp connector and connect the account.

WhatsApp has rules the other channels do not, and they are the vendor’s, not the platform’s: recipients must have opted in, business-initiated messages outside a 24-hour window have to use a pre-approved template, and each message is priced. A notification route is business-initiated by definition, so plan on templates. Check the connector’s own tool descriptions for how it takes them.

Somewhere that is not a chat app

The destination does not have to be a message at all. A route delivers through any tool, so any of these is a legitimate target:

Destination	Tool	Why
A tracker	create-issue on a Jira, Asana or GitHub connector	The notification becomes work somebody is assigned
A spreadsheet	append-row on a Sheets connector	A running log you can pivot
A CRM	log-activity on a CRM connector	The event lands on the customer record

The arguments are that tool’s, and {{title}} / {{body}} / {{subject}} / {{inbox.url}} are available in all of them.

When your channel is not here

If nothing installed can reach your destination, the answer is a connector that can — an MCP server exposing a send tool. That is the same door every channel above came through; none of them is special-cased in the platform.

This is deliberate. A platform with a fixed list of channels owes you a new release for every destination; one that delivers through tools grows a channel the day somebody writes a server for it. The cost is that the quality of a channel is the quality of its connector.

See Building apps for writing one.

Related

• Notifications — what notifications are, and the ceiling that governs them
• When a notification doesn’t arrive — Send test, and reading the delivery ledger
• Route reference — every field, match rule and placeholder
• Connectors — installing the connector a route delivers through
• Personal connectors — what a my_ tool in a route needs