MeFi Mail refresh

October 23, 2007 10:51 AM

We added a bunch MeFi Mail updates that seemed worthy of a post here (and if you have more ideas maybe add them here)

- We added a contacts page as a new tab. It lists all your contacts and has a link to start a new message to them. This is just a fancy shortcut to sending messages to your friends and seemed like an easy way to extend the contacts feature we already have built-in.

- You can now block and unblock senders easily (follow the link at the tail end of your contact page, and it only shows up if you have blocked someone).

- Added timezone support. Times of incoming messages are set according to your preferences for server offset.

- After sending a message you're redirected to the inbox instead of sent box

- We added a short blurb if you're mailing one of the admins. For any MeFi admin related messages, use the contact email form instead, since it goes to multiple people and we can answer questions together that way in an easier way than private messages.

- We added pagination, so you'll only see 20 messages per screen

Anyone got any other ideas for features missing?

posted by mathowie (staff) to Feature Requests at 10:51 AM (100 comments total)

Could we have arrows to move from message to message without going back to the inbox?
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 10:55 AM on October 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

Cool and I updated the FAQ on this. If there are other features that need to be in the FAQ entry, let me know here as well.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:55 AM on October 23, 2007

I have yet to be able to send a non-ascii representation of my cock. Please remedy this at your earliest convenience.
posted by klangklangston at 10:58 AM on October 23, 2007 [4 favorites]

Do new members automatically get a welcome Mefi Mail like we all did?
posted by ALongDecember at 11:02 AM on October 23, 2007

New members don't get a Mefi Mail yet, but it's on the to-do list.
posted by pb (staff) at 11:05 AM on October 23, 2007

Lots of cut off usernames in the contacts tab (ThePinkSuperh, jason's_plane). Seems like only multiple word usernames get the ellipsis treatment.
posted by mullacc at 11:10 AM on October 23, 2007

Though I kind of like "CunningLingui."
posted by mullacc at 11:11 AM on October 23, 2007

pb fixed the username cut-off issue.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:19 AM on October 23, 2007

It strikes me that MefiMail would be a great way to add in mechanisms for people to get in touch with anonymous question askers without having to rely on external dummy email accounts. Just adding a "mail this asker" button, and then facilitating back and forth exchanges while keeping anonymity intact.
posted by heresiarch at 11:20 AM on October 23, 2007 [9 favorites]

That's a great idea, but currently we don't connect anon posts with the person asking. If we changed the way the backend worked, we could do that and I agree it's a good idea.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:25 AM on October 23, 2007

preferences for server offset.

That's awesome.

So where is your preference for server offset?
posted by Samuel Farrow at 11:34 AM on October 23, 2007

Preferences page, first box marked "Website Settings" last option is "Time Offset" with a drop-down for hours from the server's Pacific time setting.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:35 AM on October 23, 2007

on safari, the mail line is all jangled up with the recent activity bar.
posted by anotherpanacea at 11:36 AM on October 23, 2007

Currently, deleting a message from your inbox seems to launch a new window or tab.
posted by jacquilynne at 11:39 AM on October 23, 2007

Perhaps some way to tag our contacts on the mail contacts page? So, for example, I had tagged and contacted any Mefite I'd played Halo/TeamFortress/OtherGame with I'd have a quick and easy way of adding them to a mefi mail to set up a new game?

Being able to send a mail to "each contact with tag X" would be neat too, but going through and selecting users by hand may help reduce any potential for mefi mail spam.
posted by robocop is bleeding at 11:40 AM on October 23, 2007

I'm running camino. On the blue, and only on the blue, the search button is on the mail line, breaking the layout slightly.

This doesn't happen on any of the other sections. It's rather odd.
posted by Arturus at 11:43 AM on October 23, 2007

I was going to suggest that MeFites geographically nearby also get a link, because I wish there were an easier way to inform folks about meetups (not everyone goes to MeTa to check out the sidebar) but I can see how you wouldn't want to encourage spam.
posted by desuetude at 11:45 AM on October 23, 2007

Yeah, I'm working on the layout issue on the header today.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 11:53 AM on October 23, 2007

Sorry Mat, taking this piss. I can see now why you expressed it thus, but still:

Times of incoming messages are set according to where in this beautiful big world you come from.
posted by Samuel Farrow at 11:59 AM on October 23, 2007

Someone should send me one.
No friends. :(
posted by milarepa at 12:03 PM on October 23, 2007

Turns out I have 1 contact. Pomegranate, I'm sorry for letting our relationship wither. Clearly we meant something to each other at some point. Today when I think of you, I think of a vague kind of fruit with maybe a fuzzy skin. Is that very far off? Can we rekindle what we once had? Should we?
posted by stupidsexyFlanders at 12:35 PM on October 23, 2007

How about every hundredth MeFiMail wins a prize?
posted by GuyZero at 12:38 PM on October 23, 2007

This is awesome, mathowie/pb!

I second heresiarch's idea and Greg Nog's idea.
posted by danb at 12:51 PM on October 23, 2007

this might be useless, but maybe have a way to mail the X users closest to us to tell them about a meetup?

iam (bmezine) has a feature like this, and it's told me about a lot of things in my area (mod related) that i wouldn't have known about otherwise.

i dunno....
posted by misanthropicsarah at 1:00 PM on October 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

Hey mathowie and pb,
As long as you have the tool box open, could you sort everyone so that any user could send an appropriate greeting to other users for Christmas, Channukah, Kwanzaa, Valentine's Day, Saint Patrick's, etc?
Thanks, and a belated Happy Birthday.
posted by Cranberry at 1:12 PM on October 23, 2007

Anyone got any other ideas for features missing?

well since you're asking, howsabout bold/italic/link buttons for the too-lazy-to-html?
posted by juv3nal at 1:23 PM on October 23, 2007

Also, is there some way you could implement some kind of Facebook-style food fight?
posted by smackfu at 1:25 PM on October 23, 2007

I'd like to see the text to which I'm replying when I'm answering someone's mail.

Seconded.
posted by languagehat at 1:25 PM on October 23, 2007

Html is stripped, I believe, juv3nal. It's all plain text.
posted by micayetoca at 1:27 PM on October 23, 2007

The only important missing feature is the "any messages whatsoever in nowonmai's inbox" feature - until that is addressed I can't comment on the implementation or otherwise of other features. "Pagination", indeed.
posted by nowonmai at 1:28 PM on October 23, 2007

this might be useless, but maybe have a way to mail the X users closest to us to tell them about a meetup?

great idea--a way to mefimail all locals when you post here in MeTa for a meetup?
posted by amberglow at 1:33 PM on October 23, 2007

a way to mefimail all locals when you post here in MeTa for a meetup?

We specifically didn't build in any sort of "message more than one person at a time" features to this. While I like the meetup-mail idea, I really think that anything that auto-mefimails people for any reason is not a great idea in a community as large as this one. We want to encourage people to use MeFiMail and in order to do that we want to make sure it's pretty spam-free.

Since the only way to not get "meetup!" messages is to just turn off MeFiMail that's counter to the plan of having the MeFiMail system in the first place. Maybe in the future we can have levels of turning-off so that people could get or not get meetups as they choose, but for now it's not on the 2.0-plan list at least not unless it's tweaked some.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 1:38 PM on October 23, 2007

we just added the reply text above the message input area.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:39 PM on October 23, 2007

I noticed a bug in the new Metafilter mail. My mailbox is empty. It's just a technical thing, right? It's not because no one loves me. There's probably like twenty messages backed up in there inviting me to birthdays and singalongs and stuff. But all it's showing now is emptiness. So much suffocating loneliness. And I fall into the emptiness, but I just keep falling and falling and it never ends but no one ever knows I'm falling because I'm all alone and no one cares.

I assume it's just an SQL error. Thanks.
posted by Pastabagel at 1:40 PM on October 23, 2007 [4 favorites]

(mefimail all locals)++
posted by StickyCarpet at 1:42 PM on October 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

mefi mail all locals would annoy me. Even for places with well attended meetups, a tiny fraction of local residents go so you'd automatically be bugging 99% of the recipients.

It works better as a one-to-one tool.
posted by mathowie (staff) at 1:48 PM on October 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

Not that Matamynx needs more work to do, but perhaps the MeetupMailMessage could be vetted & sent through youse guys?
posted by desuetude at 1:51 PM on October 23, 2007

mefi mail all locals would annoy me. Even for places with well attended meetups, a tiny fraction of local residents go so you'd automatically be bugging 99% of the recipients.

What about having an opt-in option the your profile? That way a Meetup message only goes to those who manually check the magic box.
posted by jmd82 at 1:57 PM on October 23, 2007

mathowie: "It works better as a one-to-one tool."

Not only that, but a little bird told me that half of the point was to make mass-annoying harder.

I'm marked as opted-out and forward-to-email. But I still got a non-welcome MeFi mail the other day, and it wasn't forwarded. I haven't deleted it yet if you want to inspect the db or the logs, mathowie/pb.
posted by Plutor at 2:05 PM on October 23, 2007

Not only that, but a little bird told me that half of the point was to make mass-annoying harder.

Exactly. If someone is going to annoy me, I want to be sure they took the time to annoy ME personally.

And I can't figure out what cities would really need a mass-meetup message tool. You either live somewhere with 3 other people, so you can do it by hand, and there's hundreds, and you wouldn't want all those people to come, anyway.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 2:08 PM on October 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

Matt is the man
always has a plan
to help us play in the sand
and massage our mental gland!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 2:09 PM on October 23, 2007

Plutor, just to be clear, you set yourself as opt-out to MeFi Mail entirely right? Then someone sent you a message (they should have been blocked) and it didn't forward to your email, but you're saying your new mail indicator went up by one?
posted by mathowie (staff) at 2:10 PM on October 23, 2007

i don't know--i always need reminding, and it's not like it's regular email--it lives here and a tiny notice on top of the homepage tells you you have mail. I think bringing meetups to the attention of more and newer people is always a plus, too.
posted by amberglow at 2:11 PM on October 23, 2007

Feature request: Linked usernames on the inbox and sent mail pages. The links could either go to their profiles (2 clicks to mailto again) or open a new message to them (1 click to mail again).
posted by carsonb at 2:13 PM on October 23, 2007

heresiarch's anon-messaging idea is a really, really excellent one.

Is multiple-recipients a possibility? r-i-b's tag idea seems like overkill, but being able to check off a bunch of contacts and send them all a message would be useful.
posted by mkultra at 2:16 PM on October 23, 2007

Here's my crazy solution to the emailing anonymous... Create a mailbox that all users could view and all memail to it would come without identifying information. In the subject, you put what thread you're responding to. Then people could respond anonymously to anonymous questions.
posted by drezdn at 2:26 PM on October 23, 2007

Ah yes, like the "login" login.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 2:29 PM on October 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

I don't know if anybody mentioned this, but I can't seem to send pictures of klangklangston's cock yet.
posted by koeselitz at 2:34 PM on October 23, 2007

I would like a mefimail link in the byline for people's comments/posts. As in, the text immediately below what you are currently reading would say:

posted by shmegegge at 5:34 PM on October 23 [+] [!][mail]
posted by shmegegge at 2:42 PM on October 23, 2007

Regarding meetup invitations: it's trivially easy to add a bunch of nearby Mefites as contacts with a "neighbo(u)r" relationship. Then, come meetup time, you can send a nice, personalized invitation to each of your neighbour contacts.

Much nicer than spamming a whole list, and not that much harder, either.
posted by timeistight at 2:47 PM on October 23, 2007

Somewhat unrelated, but why is my email address now displayed as fully typed out mailto: link in my profile page?
posted by phaedon at 2:49 PM on October 23, 2007

Future pony -- how about a "Your Saved E-mail" tab -- where you can store received e-mails for future reference?
posted by ericb at 2:50 PM on October 23, 2007

This mass-mefi-mail business is a bad idea, even if it would represent my only chance of ever getting a message. If the setting was "X closest MeFites" as proposed, a value of X that would only cover a few square yards of Brooklyn would span whole continents in other cases. You could try to mail "all MeFites within X miles", but there is no value of X that wouldn't cause distress.
One sensible possibility would be to have localised opt-in distribution lists, but this would most likely be a lot of work for the admins for not a tremendous benefit.
posted by nowonmai at 2:54 PM on October 23, 2007

Somewhat unrelated, but why is my email address now displayed as fully typed out mailto: link in my profile page?

We changed the auto-munging because many people have decent spam filters and felt that it was not needed. Your options now are:

1. use an email address that will show up AS an email address to logged in users
2. not show your email address on your profile page

and/or

3. put a munged email address in the "About Me" section

and then you can turn MeFi Mail on or off as you want.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 2:56 PM on October 23, 2007

I like that it says "welcome back chiababe" up there at the top right corner now. It's very friendly.

It also lessens the sting from my empty MeMail box.
posted by chiababe at 3:05 PM on October 23, 2007

Woo! Reply text!
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:12 PM on October 23, 2007

mathowie: "Plutor, just to be clear, you set yourself as opt-out to MeFi Mail entirely right? Then someone sent you a message (they should have been blocked) and it didn't forward to your email, but you're saying your new mail indicator went up by one?"

Yes. That is what happened. This was like 6 hours after Mefi Mail launched, though, so I assumed it was just Work-In-Progress-ism. As far as I know, no one has tried to do it again since then, so I'm not sure if it could be replicated.
posted by Plutor at 3:32 PM on October 23, 2007

shmegegge: "I would like a mefimail link in the byline for people's comments/posts. As in, the text immediately below what you are currently reading would say:

posted by shmegegge at 5:34 PM on October 23 [+] [!][mail]"

Of course, keeping with the short and sweet ascii buttons in the byline, it would be:

post by shmegegge at 2:42 PM on October 23 [+] [!] [@]

posted by team lowkey at 3:37 PM on October 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

good suggestion, shmegegge/team lowkey.
posted by desjardins at 3:45 PM on October 23, 2007

Can this page (mail > contacts tab) indicate that people are not mail-able? Maybe a red X through the envelope?

Also, and this is a nit, but do you have a bigger envelope for that page? Or maybe make the whole div / table cell clickable? There doesn't seem to be any reason to make the icon so small like there is in the toolbar.
posted by smackfu at 3:46 PM on October 23, 2007

Also, the envelope icon is not clickable on people's user pages, under their name. (Sorry, I'm picky.)
posted by smackfu at 3:48 PM on October 23, 2007

I can't seem to send pictures of klangklangston's cock yet.

That's not a bug, that's a feature!
posted by wendell at 3:49 PM on October 23, 2007

Let's see...

prosted by Rock Steady at 6:47pm on October 23 [+] [!] [@] ["] [$] [&] [^] [#] [*]

That's Favorite, Flag, Mail, Quote this comment, Paypal $5 to this user, Mark this user as a Contact, Search Wikipedia for this user, Get this user's Phone Number, Send Facepunch to this user via HTTP.
posted by Rock Steady at 3:53 PM on October 23, 2007 [9 favorites]

Rock Steady, you forgot a symbol for Launch Nethack.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:00 PM on October 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

Exactly. If someone is going to annoy me, I want to be sure they took the time to annoy ME personally.

*stops plotting to make time to annoy ThePinkSuperhero*

...

*resumes plotting*
posted by quin at 4:04 PM on October 23, 2007

I like that it says "welcome back chiababe" up there at the top right corner now.

Welcome Back, Kotter!
posted by ericb at 4:14 PM on October 23, 2007

Possible bug: I'm sorry if this has already been brought up, but for names that are cut off, if I hover over them, I guess a box of their full username is supposed to appear? Well it does, but is it supposed to appear directly beneath the MetaFilter logo in the upperleft corner, or where the mouse is hovering over the name? Because it's doing the former, not the latter.
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 4:15 PM on October 23, 2007

His dreams were his ticket out.
posted by cortex (staff) at 4:19 PM on October 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

“I can't seem to send pictures of klangklangston's cock yet.”

That's because no HTML is allowed in Mefi Mail—that includes the <small> tag.
posted by Ethereal Bligh at 4:27 PM on October 23, 2007 [5 favorites]

*stops plotting to make time to annoy ThePinkSuperhero*

::runs to check inbox:: Empty? :-(
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 4:32 PM on October 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

mathowie writes "mefi mail all locals would annoy me."

Besides think of the poor bastards forced to live in NYC with hundreds of members within spitting distance.
posted by Mitheral at 4:45 PM on October 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

"His dreams were his ticket out.
posted by cortex at 4:19 PM on October 2"

Please check into the real story here. It is easy to imagine that #1614 Kotter sold Fred a used car, and both went away fulfilled. Or not.
posted by Cranberry at 4:46 PM on October 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

"That's because no HTML is allowed in Mefi Mail—that includes the small tag."

ZING!
posted by klangklangston at 4:56 PM on October 23, 2007

Awesome, I just used the new features to send a message to each of my contacts, telling them they were blocked.
posted by Eideteker at 5:04 PM on October 23, 2007

I'm not sure if this is done already or not (I have no friends), but can we have it so that if mefimail is forwarded to email, and the sending member makes their email address public, the Reply-To: on the generated email is set to that address? That way, we can just hit reply and get to them directly!
posted by bkudria at 5:04 PM on October 23, 2007 [2 favorites]

bkudria, I really like that.
posted by cortex (staff) at 5:07 PM on October 23, 2007

Just to put my request from the other thread in this: either auto-quote on reply or maybe the option when hitting the reply button to open it in a target=_blank so we can refer back to what people said in the message to which we're replying would be nice.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:11 PM on October 23, 2007

OK, that's the fastest one of my feature requests has ever appeared on the site. Thanks -- I'm impressed!

So, since I'm on a roll, how about a cc feature, too? (Ripe for wendellian hijinks, maybe, though, I guess...)
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:28 PM on October 23, 2007

Looks like the bug I mentioned has been fixed. Yay!
posted by CitrusFreak12 at 6:56 PM on October 23, 2007

"wendellian hijinks"?!?

No, I would not support a cc feature for MeFi Mail myself.

And if my misdeeds have in any way provided the impetus or inspiration for this marvelous new system of communication, then my work here is done... for now.
posted by wendell at 7:02 PM on October 23, 2007

mathowie - I apologize in advance for being one of the those assholes, but the mail link is really messy on the iPhone, and it runs across all the right-side links when I get mail.
posted by dw at 7:03 PM on October 23, 2007

Everyone, please send a copy of all meetup invitations to amberglow, even if you live in South Dakota. That way he'll be in the loop regardless, and the rest of us won't be on a list getting a jillion notices.

Heck, maybe especially if you live in South Dakota.
posted by yhbc at 7:40 PM on October 23, 2007

Ooh, ooh, I just got a mail! And, cortex, it didn't do what I want! How come other people ponies get delivered doubleplus quick?

:)
posted by bkudria at 8:52 PM on October 23, 2007

I wouldn't mind seeing threaded messages. That'd be cool.
posted by Effigy2000 at 8:56 PM on October 23, 2007

How come other people ponies get delivered doubleplus quick?

I think that was more a matter of happy synchronicity than anything else. I don't seriously believe that pb and Matt coded up my request in like 20 minutes (though that would certainly be the optimal and proactive solution moving forward at this juncture).
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 8:59 PM on October 23, 2007

Make it crash iPhones.
posted by pompomtom at 9:02 PM on October 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

I prefer the term "Wendellian nightmare".

2+2=HILARITY!!!
posted by Alvy Ampersand at 9:15 PM on October 23, 2007 [1 favorite]

Are there plans for mail search? How about sorting options (labels, folders, what have you)? It's not something urgent, but give it a few months' or a year's worth of mail, and it'll be almost impossible to dig out an old message.
posted by Upton O'Good at 9:42 PM on October 23, 2007

I'm against the Reply-To thing -- I'd prefer to keep email separate from MefiMail (using the forwarding feature just to let me know that I got a message).

As far as meetup messages go, just put the meetups on the front page and you won't need that feature.

mathowie -- for anonymous posts, how about an option when they create the post that says "allow anonymous MefiMail" or something. I don't know how you'd implement it though, because people would obviously want to stay anonymous during the exchange.
posted by spiderskull at 10:53 PM on October 23, 2007

I loooooove the reply-to munging idea. Maybe another checkbox that appears if fwd-to-email is selected?

Anything that lets anons follow up more easily is better.

Ooh! What about "Your AskMe Thread is about to close, now's the time to follow up?"
posted by Skorgu at 4:43 AM on October 24, 2007

I think that was more a matter of happy synchronicity than anything else. I don't seriously believe that pb and Matt coded up my request in like 20 minutes (though that would certainly be the optimal and proactive solution moving forward at this juncture).

In fact, to really poo on the illusion, the feature had been implemented and documented in-thread about five hours before stavros asked for it.

More like stavrosthedidn'treadthethreadchicken, amirite?

Hint: I am so rite.
posted by cortex (staff) at 8:18 AM on October 24, 2007 [1 favorite]

Hooray for the header display being fixed.
posted by Arturus at 1:06 PM on October 24, 2007

*shakes operatic mock-shatnerian fist at cortex, howls*
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 10:32 PM on October 24, 2007

I am going to sit here very quietly, rocking in my corner, whilst muttering incomprehensibly about how I actually really like the pared down simplicity of MefiMail. I don't want folders, CCs, searches, attachments, alerts to my real email, or three years of archived messages. MefiMail is not, in fact, email; it is messaging that fills a very small communications gap around email, and should be treated and coded as such.

But never mind. Is it my turn yet, nurse?
posted by DarlingBri at 5:13 AM on October 25, 2007 [2 favorites]

yup--it's internal messaging more than acual mail.
posted by amberglow at 11:04 AM on October 25, 2007

bug(?)
on trying to toggle "Forward MeFi Mail to email?" from checked to unchecked and the saving my preferences, encountered this:

Element TITLES is undefined in FORM.
The error occurred on line 172.

    * Current Page: http://www.metafilter.com/contribute/customize.cfm
    * Referring Page: http://www.metafilter.com/contribute/customize.cfm
    * Date and Time: Thu Oct 25 15:19:41 PDT 2007
    * Your Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.8) Gecko/20071008 Firefox/2.0.0.8

posted by juv3nal at 3:23 PM on October 25, 2007

err..nevermind. it was reproducible at the time, but it looks ok now.
posted by juv3nal at 3:20 PM on October 26, 2007

juv3nal: it's something we fixed last night, you're not crazy.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 3:25 PM on October 26, 2007

She's trying to trick you! Don't trust her! She's mad! Mad!
posted by cortex (staff) at 3:26 PM on October 26, 2007

She's mad! Mad!
Well if she's mad, that would make me delusional as well. I prefer the explanation where I get to be not crazy.
posted by juv3nal at 4:51 PM on October 26, 2007