PieFedAll about email
submitted by
Rimu
The last week has been all about email.
With the addition of the private message ( kinda -private message...) feature the previous week it became more important that recipients are aware they have an unread notification waiting for their attention. Without an email telling them about it they might not see the message for days or whenever they next log in.
So now there's an automated email that goes out to people with unread notifications. The logic of it all took a while to get right - the system needs to track when someone last used PieFed, keep track of whether an email has already been sent for a notification, handle bounces, stop sending after a few bounces, etc. Also getting AWS SES set up right and SPF/DKIM/DMARC was quite a rabbit hole but one I'm very familiar with so it was pretty smooth sailing.
If you'd rather not receive those notification emails, click the unsubscribe link in the bottom of one of them or go to https://piefed.social/user/settings and untick the second checkbox. There's a checkbox for email newsletters too, which is a different thing.
Instance admins now have an email newsletter function which will email everyone. I'll probably use that once a month or so to give a summary of new features, news, etc.
Many people's email inboxes are overflowing or ignored so I'll be looking at adding push notifications pretty soon. As part of this PieFed will need to have a service worker, which will make it into a PWA.
Thank you!
Now I am wondering about a integration of email protocol with AP.
Create toots from email just for the sake of it lol.
A long time ago I did something similar - made a forum with nested comments (not federated) that also functioned as an email list. So people receive a notification in their inbox, about a post on the web. They could reply to the email and the body of the email would become a reply on the website, generating another notification email, etc.
It worked, mostly. But it was very difficult to parse email bodies consistently as there is no standard delimiter between replies and quotes-of-old replies, signatures and footers for unsubscribe links. A user can edit all parts of a message so anything is possible. Posts that looked ok in email would look bad on the web, or the other way around. It became a nightmare.