[p2pu-dev] Reply by email to notifications, formatting

[Stian Håklev]

Hi Dirk,

it's always hard to guess what other people will think about something, but
I think a huge amount of people have been exposed to mailing lists - for
example, my university has several mailing lists that all students are
subscribed to, including updates about funding opportunities, emergency
weather messages etc. And even if people aren't used to this convention, I
think they would catch on pretty quickly, and it wouldn't confuse them :)
(One important thing is that it would enable filtering so you could put all
of the messages from a given course into a certain label etc).

As for headers, I'm not that familiar with the e-mail protocol and e-mail
readers, but one thing that would be massively helpful is if GMail was able
to recognize conversation threads, and sort the messages accordingly. I'm
not quite sure what GMail bases this on, but I know that for github issues,
it automatically puts different messages together into one thread which
makes it much easier to read, archive etc. Perhaps this is simply based on
the subject line?

Stian

On Sat, Jul 14, 2012 at 6:11 AM, Dirk Uys <dirk at p2pu.org> wrote:

> Hi Stian
>
> This sounds like a good idea! One thing I'm wondering about is the use of
> course name/short name in brackets in the subject line. Eg.
> [chin-shopkeep]. This makes lots of sense to me as a technical person using
> a lot of mailing lists, but does it make sense to other non tech people as
> well?
>
> The from address can easily be done, currently we set the from address to
> be "P2PU <reply+asdfjlwerlwe at reply.p2pu.org>", but substituting P2PU for
> the sender's name wouldn't be a problem. I created a issue on github for
> this (https://github.com/p2pu/lernanta/issues/173)
>
> Another thing that I am wondering about is what headers we need to
> include? Github sets List-Id, List-Archive, List-Unsubscribe and some
> others. We should also set Message-ID. (
> https://github.com/p2pu/lernanta/issues/172)
>
> Please keep the suggestions coming on how we can improve the reply by
> email!
>
> Cheers
> d
>
>
> On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 6:20 PM, Jessy Kate Schingler <jessy at jessykate.com
> > wrote:
>
>> wow, YES, totally. +100 for this formatting. (though keeping all the fun
>> footer messages :))
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Jul 13, 2012 at 6:11 PM, Stian Håklev <shaklev at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I will be very happy to buy whoever implemented this a beer the next
>>> time we meet! This is really awesome - I've been begging for this kind of
>>> functionality for ever, and it's a bit overwhelming to actually see it
>>> implemented, and working perfectly! :))
>>>
>>> I wonder if we can have a look at the formatting of the messages though,
>>> currently there seems to be a lot of "cruft"... here's an example message:
>>>
>>> ---
>>> Chinese for shopkeepers was updated.
>>>
>>>
>>> Stian Haklev posted a new comment at Experimenting.
>>>
>>> Comment:
>>> This actually works
>>>
>>> See comment at: https://p2pu.org/comments/19235/
>>>
>>> You can reply to this comment by email! Just type your reply at the top.
>>>
>>> Sincerely,
>>> The P2PU Team
>>>
>>> Manage how often you get these delightful messages at:
>>> http://p2pu.org/profile/edit/settings/
>>> ---
>>>
>>> The actual comment is just one line long, and it is buried under all the
>>> other "chrome" (especially if you get a lot of update messages, where 90%
>>> of the contents is the same). Looking at GitHub, for example, they use the
>>> username as sender, without faking the sending email (something like from:
>>> Stian Haklev <reply+34093409 at p2pu.org>).
>>>
>>> We also talked a few times about assigning, or letting the user assign,
>>> short codes to courses. That way the name of the course could be embedded
>>> in the subject line, and the actual subject of the message (or of the
>>> task). So instead of seeing
>>>
>>> ---
>>> P2PU        Stian Haklev posted a new comment in Chinese for Shop
>>> Keepers....
>>> ---
>>> in the inbox overview, we could see
>>> ---
>>> Stian Haklev      [chin-shopkeep] What are the most important characters
>>> for advertising?
>>> ---
>>>
>>> and the e-mail could be compressed to something like this:
>>>
>>> ---
>>> from: Stian Haklev <reply-340924093 at p2pu.org>
>>> subj: [chin-shopkeep] What are the most important characters for
>>> advertising?
>>>
>>> I was reading about different characters used in monetary transactions
>>> yesterday, and I wondered whether 快 or 块 was actually the correct
>>> signifier? The literature differs.
>>>
>>> Stian
>>>
>>> --
>>> This message was posted in the Chinese for Shopkeepers Course<http://f/> on
>>> P2PU. View thread <http://f/>, or respond to this message directly.
>>> ---
>>>
>>> Just a suggestion, but I'd love to see some tinkering with this format.
>>>
>>> Stian
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> p2pu-dev mailing list
>>> p2pu-dev at lists.p2pu.org
>>> http://lists.p2pu.org/mailman/listinfo/p2pu-dev
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jessy Kate Schingler
>> http://jessykate.com
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> p2pu-dev mailing list
>> p2pu-dev at lists.p2pu.org
>> http://lists.p2pu.org/mailman/listinfo/p2pu-dev
>>
>>
>
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