- Joined
- 10 February 2000
- Messages
- 2,677
I was looking for something in my NSX Prime gmail account today and noticed that there are a huge number of people who continue to reply to PM notifications via e-mail. I normally don't see them because I have a filter set up that automatically deletes them.
Replying to them doesn't work - the reply just goes into my gmail trash folder.
I suspect some people realize their mistake after they send the e-mail, but I am guessing many people never realize what has happened, and since the e-mail doesn't bounce back to them as undeliverable there is a real potential for communication breakdown. Unfortunately gmail does not currently support autoresponders based on filters so I can't set up anything on gmail to bounce those messages back to people.
Doing a quick search I see dozens of people a month are making this mistake.
I tried to avoid this by putting the following in four different places in each PM notifcation plus a couple additional lines explaining that you can't reply to these notification e-mails. Here is an example with the user name of the person who sent me the PM x'd out:
..but of course half the people never bother to read anything, and others are just in the habit of hitting "reply" when they want to respond to something that comes via e-mail.
The only solution that comes to mind is to modify the template so that it does not show you the actual contents of the PM in the notification e-mail. It would still show who sent you the PM and the title of the PM but I can have it stop showing the contents. This disables one of the conveniences of the PM notification e-mail, but it would basically force people to log in to PM to read the message. I think this would virtually eliminate people trying to reply to PMs via e-mail. It would have the side benefit of making the PM notifications much smaller because I would also remove the huge number of notes saying not to reply to the e-mail.
It doesn't really matter either way to me personally, but it appears to be an ongoing problem so I'll put it out there as a poll and get some feedback.
Replying to them doesn't work - the reply just goes into my gmail trash folder.
I suspect some people realize their mistake after they send the e-mail, but I am guessing many people never realize what has happened, and since the e-mail doesn't bounce back to them as undeliverable there is a real potential for communication breakdown. Unfortunately gmail does not currently support autoresponders based on filters so I can't set up anything on gmail to bounce those messages back to people.
Doing a quick search I see dozens of people a month are making this mistake.
I tried to avoid this by putting the following in four different places in each PM notifcation plus a couple additional lines explaining that you can't reply to these notification e-mails. Here is an example with the user name of the person who sent me the PM x'd out:
..but of course half the people never bother to read anything, and others are just in the habit of hitting "reply" when they want to respond to something that comes via e-mail.
The only solution that comes to mind is to modify the template so that it does not show you the actual contents of the PM in the notification e-mail. It would still show who sent you the PM and the title of the PM but I can have it stop showing the contents. This disables one of the conveniences of the PM notification e-mail, but it would basically force people to log in to PM to read the message. I think this would virtually eliminate people trying to reply to PMs via e-mail. It would have the side benefit of making the PM notifications much smaller because I would also remove the huge number of notes saying not to reply to the e-mail.
It doesn't really matter either way to me personally, but it appears to be an ongoing problem so I'll put it out there as a poll and get some feedback.
