This is probably a holdover from folks that are using Discourse in a similar manner to old email listservs, but what I’m noticing is that many users signup for email notifications and then build a rule to shuttle them to a specific mail folder. Sometimes they look at the folder, sometimes they don’t.
At issue is when someone @mentions a user in a post, the Subject for the @mentioned notification is the same as any other for example, this message contained an @mention of my username:
[CLC-ListServ] [Staff] This is a test of a large image
I was wondering if email notifications that were @mentions to the user in question could have something added to their subject line, like:
[CLC-ListServ] [Staff] [@mention] This is a test of a large image.
That way we could inform users that they should build mail filters that treated these messages differently, so they were less likely to just end up in one of their Bacn folders.
Sometimes it takes a while for someone to come up with a great idea.
Seriously, though, in my community we are also struggling with people who are intimidated with discourse and rely on their email to keep up with discussions and to reply. Then discourse competes with all the rest of the information overload they grapple with daily, and the old school strategies they use (like filtering into folders) means that messages get lost.
The answer seems to be to get these people to log into discourse, but it’s an uphill battle. In the meantime, any tricks to help them to pay attention to the posts that matter, that show up in their email, are welcome.
We’ve been running our Discourse instance for over a year and this only came up recently. I think that as the number of posts has ramped up in our community, some folks have started building up their mail filters.
I noticed this because in the past month or so several times when I’d @mentioned people, I would NOT hear back from them. I checked Mandrill, saw they got a message. When I got in touch with them, they said they missed the @mention because they hadn’t reviewed the folders where the email notifications are going.
Actually this is another area where Discourse could offer something more than a traditional email listserv. To my knowledge, a traditional listserv doesn’t distinguish a @mentioned message from a list message in the subject either.
I wouldn’t classify this as a vital feature, but rather an added bonus.
