There are email notifications as well, but they are general and not customized. I hope that there will be notifications within the same account in the forum instead of using the bot.
So far, bot notification are much more useful than email notification for certain things like merit, mention and quote etc. But email notification also have their uses even when you can't trust bots such as message notification, email change, and password change etc. But of course it would be great if the forum also had more complete notification like it has been possible with bots so far.