Comment 0 for bug 1253213

This is a huge ticket, taking notes of all the things I find suboptimal in the way email notifications work. We may want to split it in multiple issues later.

I have created a new profile and added tag "swift" to the box "subscribed tags". My understanding is that if I subscribe to a tag I should get immediate notifications of new questions tagged "Swift". Instead after 24 hours I got a general message (see below for its content).

As a user, I'm not particularly enthusiastic about receiving a message from a web service and if that message comes with little explanations of why I'm receiving it or how to interact with it. Its readability could also be improved.

The subject for the default message should be something like:

       New questions asked on the Ask OpenStack that may interest you

(as opposed to //X number of Questions updated ...// who cares if they've been updated). I think it would be much better if we got rid of the title of the site in [], remove 'updated', remove the list of tags which have little chance to be interesting to the new user anyway.

The text should not mention 'updated' but say that questions are 'asked' (who cares if they were updated or not: I want a notification if they need answers).

The text should also call for helping others get answers, with a direct request like:

     If you know the answer, tell [AUTHOR], add a comment to ask him for more details or vote the question up if it's interesting.

Reporting in the email the number of revisions of questions or answers is not very useful, I'd avoid mentioning to make the email cleaner and easier to parse.

I have also decided to get immediate notifications for questions tagged as "Swift". I would like the subject of the message to be:

   New question about [$TAG_SUBSCRIBED_TO]: $TITLE_OF_THE_QUESTION

again, I don't care if it was edited or it's the first question: as a user who subscribed to a tag I just want to see the latest revision, not the changes. (I guess the changes are relevant only for the person who originally asked). The content of the message should be:

  $ORIGINAL_AUTHOR asked a question about $TAG_SUBSCRIBED_TO:

  $LATEST_CONTENT_OF_QUESTION

  If you know the answer, have comments or want to vote the question up (if interesting) go to $URL_OF_THE_QUESTION

  $FOOTER (more or less as it is now)

Subject: [Ask OpenStack] 3 updated questions about "keystone", "policyapi", "sync",
 "rbac", "policy.json" and more
From: <email address hidden>
To: <email address hidden>
Date: Wed, 20 Nov 2013 03:05:41 -0000
Message-ID: <email address hidden>

--===============0229092453766286422==
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Dear ruperzio,

The following 3 questions have been updated on Ask OpenStack:

whats the difference between Policies stored in policy.json and policies that can be created using openstack/identity/v3/policies

(4 rev)

Region to region account and container sync in openstack swift

(new question, 1 ans, 1 ans rev)

I am installing keystone and mysql failed to start

(2 rev, 1 ans, 1 ans rev)

To change frequency, language and content of these alerts, please visit your user profile.

If you believe that this message was sent in an error, please email about it the forum administrator at <email address hidden>.

Sincerely,Ask OpenStack Administrator