Email notifications of forum posts 26 August 2022 at 12:03PM edited 26 August 2022 at 12:43PM in Site feedback 10 replies 247 views

Molehusband

I have elected to receive email notifications of posts on forums so I can keep up to date as appropriate. This means in particular that for certain threads I receive an email for every single new post. In principle that's fine, but the number of posts can vary vastly between different threads. In particular, some threads may receive a new post every few minutes and this can result in drowning my inbox with so many emails that it becomes difficult to manage. May I request a feature which allows me to limit the individual emailed notifications to a reasonable number? For example, if a thread received more than a certain number of posts (let's say 5) in a day, I would prefer to receive a single email notifying me of these various new posts.

Precise implementation of my suggestion is subject to discussion and I hope we can thereby solve the problem of possible saturated inboxes while still informing users of new posts.

MSE_James

Hello @Molehusband

Our software providers are currently working on improvements to the notifications features, which should address some of the issues you raise.

Please watch this space for further developments. 

gwapenut

This has been promised ever since the forum "upgrade" though and yet it never comes. It used to work really well, and the new forum software had ruined it.

Just try looking at email notifications in Android Gmail. Three quarters of the screen is taken to with the title saying in truly unnecessarily massive font what forum has had a new message and from who. You then always have to scroll down to the tiny font of the content of the email which is actually useful, and then it's truncated after a few words meaning you need to click through.

Some forums are overrun with offtopic nattering about trivia, which never used to matter with a daily email 

This "new" forum software was a dreadful step back in usability. The developers need to try using it themselves.

Brie

@Molehusband
Why not set up a rule on your email account to divert any of the notices to a dedicated folder?  Then you won't have to wade through them all to find things from friends, banks etc.  If you are on outlook you should be able to right click when you are on a received email and get an option to go to "rules".

Molehusband

Brie said:

@Molehusband
Why not set up a rule on your email account to divert any of the notices to a dedicated folder?  Then you won't have to wade through them all to find things from friends, banks etc.  If you are on outlook you should be able to right click when you are on a received email and get an option to go to "rules".

Thanks, I am aware of the facility as I've been using email for decades. I get a very large amount of email and prefer to initially receive it all in my inbox and don't want to have start by browsing numerous subfolders. In any case I don't want to have to struggle through possibly dozens of unnecessary MSE emails and spending time deleting most. Once I've viewed my inbox, I decide what to do with the contents such as moving into folders dedicated for different email.
Up to about 1 email a day from MSE in my inbox for each forum topic would make managing my email significantly easier.

SpanishBlue

Before the forum was "upgraded", you would just get one email when a new post was submitted. Till you visited the forum and read it, you would not get any more emails regardless of how many new posts there were after that.

It was a far better system., but unfortunately the new forum doesn't currently allow that.

Hopefully the promised changes will go back to the old system.

MSE_James

When there's news on the upgrades to the notifications service, I promise to post back in this thread with an update.

Molehusband

SpanishBlue said:

Before the forum was "upgraded", you would just get one email when a new post was submitted. Till you visited the forum and read it, you would not get any more emails regardless of how many new posts there were after that.

It was a far better system., but unfortunately the new forum doesn't currently allow that.

Hopefully the promised changes will go back to the old system.

Many thanks, I'm fairly new here so not familiar with the "old" system. You're absolutely right, I typically might receive a bunch of around 20 emails daily for posts in a single forum. I then have to spend time locating them in my inbox and immediately deleting 19 of them which are worthless to me.
The above applies currently while I'm visiting MSE daily. If I were to be away (eg on holiday), after say just a week, I'll  probably be drowned in around a ton of MSE emails, the vast majority of which will be unwanted. I dread to think of the time I might waste struggling through them.

Mr._H_2

SpanishBlue said:

Before the forum was "upgraded", you would just get one email when a new post was submitted. Till you visited the forum and read it, you would not get any more emails regardless of how many new posts there were after that.

It was a far better system., but unfortunately the new forum doesn't currently allow that.

Hopefully the promised changes will go back to the old system.

Yes, this would be my preferred solution also. This used to be pretty much the default behaviour of all web-based fora, but for some inexplicable reason the fashion changed to sending one email per one new post - i.e. MoneySavingExpert is not the only forum with this problem.

Mr._H_2

Recently I had to turn off notifications because I started to receive two emails per every new post - has anyone else experienced that problem?

HampshireH

Mr._H_2 said:

Recently I had to turn off notifications because I started to receive two emails per every new post - has anyone else experienced that problem?

Least you're getting them at all. I've not received email notifications now for nearly a year (I noticed january) and have fed back etc. This week I had an email thanking me for my feedback but I emailed that months ago.

All a little strange how it all works