Re: [PATCH guest-common/manager v2 0/3] fix #5713: vzdump: add notification-mode none

["Lukas Wagner" <l.wagner@proxmox.com>]

On Wed May 13, 2026 at 12:31 PM CEST, Erik Fastermann wrote:
> Optionally disable sending notification mails with the new option
> none for notification-mode in vzdump.
>
> Also includes an optional commit to add this to the ui.
>

Hey Erik,

I'm very sorry for the very late reply, I completely missed this series.
If you have any other notification-related patches in the future, feel
free to ping me directly.

At first, I was a bit hesitant about whether adding a new notification
mode would be good idea. The notification mode was always a bit of a
hack, one that enabled us to support the legacy notifications
(legacy-sendmail, the ones where the user just provides an email address
at the backup job invocation/job) alongside the 'new' notification stack
based on matchers. I always planned to eventually phase out the legacy
mode, but it turned out to be quite a hard problem to automatically
migrate the old settings to an equivalent matcher-based config, which is
why the 'old' mode is still there.

Given this, I was unsure whether I wanted to build on this 'hack', but
after giving it some more thought, I think its fine. Even with the
legacy-mode phased out, the vzdump CLI should have a way to quickly opt
out from notifications (maybe it should even be the default for CLI
invocations), and using the `notification-mode` parameter is only
fitting I think.

Adding it to the UI also seems reasonable to me. I wonder if it would
make sense to also add it to backup *jobs*, but there it could make
sense to wait until a user actually requests it; we should encourage
users to set up proper notification configuration for their jobs, after
all.

I've actually thought about 'undeprecating' the legacy-mode for a while
now, as in quite a few cases is just way simpler to use if all a user
wants is to receive an email. The additional code complexity is
manageable, so maybe it should just stay as is. Just thinking out aloud
here, it's not really decided yet.

Acked-by: Lukas Wagner <l.wagner@proxmox.com>
Reviewed-by: Lukas Wagner <l.wagner@proxmox.com>
Tested-by: Lukas Wagner <l.wagner@proxmox.com>