Supporting plain text emai
Danyl Strype PublicSeen by 57The performance of the Loomio website has been so slow on my oldish computer since I started using again this year that’s it’s impractical to use. I wrote an email to @richarddbartlett about this recently, with some suggestions about how it might be improved. It might have got lost in the swamps of the spam-filter, so perhaps I need to post the cliff notes in this group?
Anyway, I decided to try interacting with my Loomio groups via email. I don’t allow HTML to be sent to me via email and I strongly discourage HTML email in general. With HTML mail turned off, all I get from Loomio is an email with Thread X as the subject, and “User X commented in: Thread X" as the body text, followed by a bunch of links.
With a few modifications, people could use Loomio as first-class citizens without the need for HTML email. For a start, including the text of the comment in the example above as plain text seems like pretty low-hanging fruit. Then I could read and perhaps respond to the comment without having to leave my inbox.
I understand that handling decisions would be more complicated. But I believe it could be done with a combination of plain text instructions and links that tell the Loomio server how the user wants to respond to the decision.
Hi @robertguthrie
I replied to this comment from my inbox. The reply doesn't seem to have come through. It was:
We automatically convert our html content in to plain text when we send emails, for the sole reason that apparently it improves your spam rating.
Hmm. So it seems for this group. But not so for the Commons Transition group, which still gives the behaviour I described in the OP. Is this something group coordinators need to change manually, or should it have happened automatically for all groups hosted on Loomio.org?
We should consider turning off the click tracking feature as we have not looked at that data in a long time and it means two requests instead of one for our users, and ugly looking links.
That sounds like an excellent idea :)
@strypey Your mail client is not working correctly if your reply by email does not work. Ensure you are sending email to the REPLYTO header not FROM
Disabling click tracking in emails is on it's way: https://github.com/loomio/loomio/pull/4673/files
I've replied to this from my inbox to test. If it does come through, then your mail client is not configured correctly, most likely it's not using honouring the REPLYTO header.
One other thing I've noticed about replying by email is that email replies don't seem to respect comment nesting. Replies by email to a previous comment just turn up as a new comment in the thread, unconnected to the original, and I presume they don't create an implicit @mention to the user whose comment is being replied to (actually does this normally happen with replies?).
A couple of other things that would help users reading Loomio comments by plain text email.
1) Links added in the web interface using MarkDown seem to be invisible to users reading by email. It would be great to have links converted into URLS in brackets in the plain text, so that "Strypey's inane ranting" becomes "Strypey's inane ranting (http://www.disintermedia.net.nz)" in emails.
2) Comments currently arrive by email without much context (other than the thread title), unless you're keeping all the previous emails and using a mail client that does threading (Geary, GMail). It would be great to have the option to have the previous comment added below the text of the current one, under a title saying 'previous comment'. Maybe this could be one long comment, or a string of short comments, up to a character limit (say 5000 chars)? Maybe there could be a widget in the email settings, with a set of radio buttons like:
* no previous comments (for people using Geary)
* one previous comment (I suggest this as the default)
* multiple previous comments up to N characters, with a box for entering a value for N, and some guidance about typical comment lengths in a few use cases
We automatically convert our html content in to plain text when we send emails (and include both versions), for the sole reason that apparently it improves your spam rating.
I don't agree that they're that bad actually. I see the subject, header and body of the message just fine.
I think the biggest problem with them is that our links are click tracking links, so they're twice as long as they could be. I think this is what you're talking about when you say: "followed by a bunch of links."
We should consider turning off the click tracking feature as we have not looked at that data in a long time and it means two requests instead of one for our users, and ugly looking links.