Mail Revamp

The Mail Revamp should be broken down into 2 different perspectives.

• Mail-In
• Mail-Out

Mail-In

The goal of Mail-in feature is to investigate what kind of content could be generated via email. More and more web applications offer mail-in features in order to help people achieve a better workflow and Index Zero

Inbox Zero

• Archive
  • Potential Tiki Mail In
    • Mail into WikiPage
    • Mail into Forum
    • Evernote, OneNote etc...
• Delegate
  • Potential Tiki Mail In
    • Mail to Wiki Page
    • Mail to Tracker Item
    • Mail to Forum
    • Asana, BaseCamp etc...

Food for thought

• Should the inbox feature allow us to tag, categorize and search? If so, what to do with existing tags or categories coming from third party services like Evernote.
• How will we manage the different versions coming from a third-party service? For example how will we manage the different versions of a note coming from Evernote?

Mail-In Use Cases

EMail Archive
The goal should be to make it easy to archive your email into Tiki as a personal cloud backup. You could potentially set an auto forward and create a new wiki page or forum post for each mail. Attachments would ideally follow and be added to a file gallery where they could be indexed and easily searched.

Internal Messaging
the internal messaging feature in Tiki is a great way to keep emails private. We use it a lot for Citadel Rock Online Communities where users want to keep their emails private yet still be able to message other users.

The problem with the feature right now is that the email that is sent as a notification only has a link. There is now way for a user to simply read and reply to internal mail messages directly from their email client.

We often see users try this and never realize that their message was never sent to the other user.

Mail-Out

Currently Tiki only offers very static emails that are sent when a specific event is triggered. These events are already pre-defined in Tiki.

We need to be able to make it easier to allow the ability for emails to be sent ad-hoc and associate them with any type of event (even if that event is not pre-defined)

Examples of non-defined events

• Goals, Recognitions, Rewards see Goals - Recognitions - Rewards
• Activity Stream Events see Activity Streams
• Organic Groups / Personalized emails (Since your Last Visit)

Agile Development Cycles

Phase 1- Mail-out Revamp

This is really about making sure there is only one library - the notifications system (and any other email sending) should send mail using the same library.

Phase 2 - Mail-in Revamp

Right now there is the mail-in but this needs be cleaned up and modernized. Arild? has been poking at it but not making any fundamental modernizing. Did he add mail in to tracker?

Right now, the forum mail in is separate from the other mail-ins, this needs to be unified into one.

The handling of the reply (removing the reply) needs to be better (I think it’s actually there in the code for Forum mail in right now but it’s old). Mail-in should discard the original message pretty much.

Also, none of the outgoing notifications have information that support the mailing in of replies. One obvious use case is comments notifications. Since it’s a comment, users should be able to reply to them and whatever is the reply should become a new comment. Thus the mail-in feature should allow the turning on of “replyable” notifications for various object types.

How this is done is to be decided - in Asana, I think they actually put a hash to identify the object type/thread to reply to.

Also, the default reply-in for other objects, such as tracker item, wiki page etc, the default action should just be to create a comment to that object. For example, if I get a notificaiton of tracker item created, and I reply to it, it should just create a comment to that tracker item (by default).

Comments are the most obvious use-case/object type that will need this, but in future there might be other use cases that would require similar mail in as well. For example, if I might want the reply to create a new object rather than comment but this is a future feature (does not seem that important right now).

The internal Messaging feature also needs this to work. When I reply to a notification of a new message, it should be a new message back to the sender. It needs to take into account the cc recipients. So those on cc need to receive it even if they don’t get the email notification per se. The prefs for the messaging notification feature also needs a bit of a cleanup, right now it’s priority 1 to 5 which is really not usable.

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