Community websites often notify users about events taking place on a website. These notification, may it classically be an email or may it try a cooler approach like instant messaging, can be good or bad. Most of the time they are really inconvenient. The following list provides a few ideas how to do it better.
First of all, let me decide which notifications I get. This will make me feel better and making me – the user – feel better is always a good thing. It is sad that not everyone is doing it. And yes, per default every notification – maybe except the notification about new messages – is disabled.
This implicitly
I hate HTML emails. I really hate them. They are seldom rendered correctly and hide the information I want to know in an unnecessary layout. Emails are just text and that’s fine. But I know people who really prefers this colorful stuff. Some people just weight a well formatted mail higher. So give them HTML. And text for me. The email standard provides us a way to do this: multipart. My mail client will render text, for others it will render HTML. We are both happy.
There are also libraries encapsulating the multipart standard. Zend_Mail from the Zend Framework is one of those, ezMail from ezComponents is another option.
By the way: there is no need to keep the mail template twice, one for text and one for Email. Use reStructuredText or Markdown to do both in one go.
When I click a link in the notification email I do not want to get a 403. I want to be logged in seamlessly. I know this is a trade-off between convenience and security but generating a secure token for each sent notification is not that hard. When I open my messagebox, let me just click the link host.com/messages/abcdefg123456 and my mailbox appears and I’m logged in. Technically that’s not hard to do, one authentication token per mail with an TTL of a week or so. This applies for Instant Messaging too.
It’s alright if you send me a mail if I’m not logged in for two weeks (unless I don’t disable it) or if you offer me cheaper deals for your payed account (unless I don’t disable it …). But please, do not try to track if I read the mail or what link I have clicked or whatever you might want to know. My inbox is private and when the mail is in my inbox, you are no longer allowed to do anything with it.
The data you get from this kind of tracking will be flawed and wrong anyway – see the chapter about formats and my preference for text above. Also a number of widely spreaded webmail clients like Google mail will not render your tracking pixels anyway, so stop doing that.
And no, it is not cool the use the XHTML extension of Jabber to load tracking pixels (alright, me, being a geek would find it sort of cool).
If you provide a free service for me and do advertising, even context sensitive advertising, it might be a fair deal for me. But this does not apply to messages you send to me. Again: my mailbox is my mailbox, so it is an act of grace to allow you to send me emails. A lot of people more important than you are not allowed to do that, so feel honored. It is just an act of courtesy to not include advertising material from you or your partners in a notification.
I would really love to see the mails you have sent me and what the status is. If your system tells me the notification mail for XYZ has been delayed, because the receiving SMTP-server does greylisting I want to know that I have to wait a few minutes. You will have that information anyway so why shouldn’t you make the process transparent to me? And no, you are not going to tell me the exact SMTP status, assume I’m not the nerd I am, assume I am a customer who wants to know what’s going on. It’s not that hard to translate an SMTP status code into a human readable (and understandable) message which can be displayed to the user.
Filed on 08-04-2008, 21:09 under Best practice, ezComponents, Instant Messaging, Notification, PHP, Webdevelopment, Zend Framework & three comments & no trackbacks
Getting notified via mail about recent warnings, information messages and error on your Gentoo system is good thing but getting notified via Jabber could be also helpful in some cases. The new notification framework of portage in the current 2.1-serie previews makes it easy and possible to implement somthing like this. To show how easy it is, I did it. You can see the result in the Gentoo Bugzilla. I am utilizing XMPPPY, a friendly Python-library to do so.
How to use?
1.) Install an ebuild of the 2.1-serie of sys-apps/portage
2.) Install dev-python/xmpppy
3.) Copy this file to /usr/lib/portage/pym/elog_modules/mod_jabber.py
4.) Edit /etc/make.conf and set the following options:
PORTAGE_ELOG_SYSTEM="jabber"
PORTAGE_ELOG_JABBERFROM="sender@host.com:password"
PORTAGE_ELOG_JABBERTO="jid1@host.com jid2@host.com admin@foo.com"
Update:
As of a request by solar and Jacub Moc I did a proper release which is availiable there and wrote an ebuild. All you have to do now is to install the ebuild and edit you configuration.
Filed on 21-05-2006, 15:03 under Code, Gentoo, Jabber, Linux, Notification, Portage, Technology, XMPPPY & three comments & no trackbacks