Email notifications - either digest or realtime to tell you when you've missed a bing/invite/etc.

[ara4n]

No description provided.

[ara4n]

This is higher priority than P3 - see also SYN-169. It's a really important way to keep people engaged with Vector.

[ara4n]

I won't make it block v0 though.

[AmandineLP]

Proposed specs, can be discussed and completed:

To reduce spam we can consider sending email notifs for bing only to users having been idle/offlline sonce a given time.

[kegsay]

I won't make it block v0 though.

Removed from v0

[ara4n]

Notes from discussing this with Amandine this morning:

• If the user has been idle for at least 2 minutes, highlight/sound notifs trigger an email notif.
• We batch email notifs together, with exponential back-off retry schedule per conversation.
• If there is a significant pause in a conversation (say 4x the current retry interval?), we reset its exponential backoff timer.
• New conversations start a new retry schedule... but we batch all pending notifs into a single email, effectively preempting a retry for older conversations. This doesn't reset the retry timer for those older conversations.

I wonder if this means we need the daily digest ones? Perhaps they can be implemented as an entirely separate mechanism. I find them quite annoying, and would probably prefer that we only spam people with updates when something new has actually happened (and these can contain the same overview stats as a digest would...)

[AmandineLP]

Don't forget invites in the above. I guess it can be just a single email everytime someone invites you, even if he used your mxid, and if don't join in the next 4 (?) minutes. (see table)

I wouldn't want to have metrics like who joined rooms and how many unread msg there are in the notifs emails sent for highlight/sound or invites, but once a day it would be interesting. So I'm still quite keen on keeping the daily digest if something new happen only and which would include:

• unread messages in favourite rooms

• List of people who joined my favourite rooms
• List of pending invites

However I understand the spam concern, so an option would be to deploy first the notifications and see how spammy it feels and then add the digest on a second step

[ara4n]

(We've agreed that for now invites & messages should have the same idle timer before email notifs kick in - 2 mins for now)

[ara4n]

One refinement that came up when discussing with dave & erik just now: rather than sending if the user has been idle for 2 minutes, we should probably wait for 2 minutes (or whatever the retry timer is) of inactivity after seeing the event before sending the email. If the user wakes up and uses the app, we should discard any pending email notifs and probably reset the timer schedule. This stops us from spamming the user if they're actually responding to push notifs elsewhere.

We could reduce the minimum timer to 0s if we know the user isn't polling and has no pushers set up, but that's a bit of an edge case.

[ara4n]

There are now designs for this in basecamp.

[eternaleye]

I'd really prefer separating this from hilight/sound notifications - as a case in point, I use Vector on the bus over cellular + tethering. However, there are various dead spots, some of which last for 5min or so.

The instant I exit the dead spot, I'm alerted to new messages and invites by my phone, due to exactly hilight/sound notifications - but in the mean time, Vector may have sent me emails that are really just so much spam.

[ara4n]

(see also https://matrix.org/jira/browse/SYN-169)

[dbkr]

Have tried to summarise requirements on https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZNxBMb9zoJNRZ12T-3_OCMgrcb3KhppTDaXtls1uDYs/edit

[ara4n]

this is pretty much live now.