title: GitLab not sending notifications to merge request approvers
body: <p>I have written an entire software development course, and until recently we've been using Bitbucket. I recently rewrote the course to use GitLab instead, mostly because GitLab the username isn't tied to a particular email like Bitbucket. I had heard good things. But I'm running into problems already.</p>
  
  <p>The first is that merge requests (what the other hosting services call "pull requests") are not sending out notifications to approvers. We just had the lesson where I taught my students to create merge requests. I had them add me as "Reporter" to their projects. Then I had them create a merge request, and add me as an "Approver".</p>
  
  <p>Yet I received no email notifying me that two student had created merge requests with me as an approver on each. I double-checked, and my global notifications are set to "Participate".</p>
  
  <p>I reported this issue in a <a href="https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/42#note_129590841" rel="noreferrer">comment to a GitLab ticket</a>, but received no response. I even filed a <a href="https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/56659" rel="noreferrer">new official GitLab bug report</a>; someone finally looked at it, and created <a href="https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/9355" rel="noreferrer">another ticket for GitLab EE</a>. So far no one has actually found the problem.</p>
  
  <p>So as a workaround I went into my GitLab nofication settings and set the notification level for each student repository to "Watch" so that I (in theory) should be notified of any activity at all. Sure enough, I was notified when my students created merge requests.</p>
  
  <p>Unfortunately even with a notification level of "watch", I was not notified when a student updated a merge request by making a new commitment to the branch and pushing it to GitLab.</p>
  
  <p>Am I doing something wrong? Why am I not getting notifications of merge requests on which I am approver—not even when I'm watching the project? If I can't get this simple, core functionality to work I guess we'll move to Github, now that they introduced private repositories.</p>