Provide IMAP (or POP) access to the DW Inbox.

[erik]

Title:
Provide IMAP (or POP) access to the DW Inbox.

Area:
DW Inbox

Summary:
I find the DW inbox cumbersome to use when it gets overfull. I'd much rather manage it like any other mailbox, in a mail application.

Description:
I've never liked the message feature of LJ/DW. I've always felt it was a weak email function bolted onto the featureset as an afterthought, serving a function that would be better served by actual email.

With that in mind I think it would be nice to be able to manage it like email, in a real email application. To do that, I'd need IMAP (or at least POP) access to my DW message inbox. This would allow me to filter out the messages I don't need to see (such as crossposting success notifications, which I cannot elect to not receive, or messages I have to get in my DW inbox in order to be allowed to get them emailed, such as comment notifications)

Poll #7884 Provide IMAP (or POP) access to the DW Inbox.

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 63

View Respondents

This suggestion:

View Answers

Should be implemented as-is.
11 (17.5%)

Should be implemented with changes. (please comment)
2 (3.2%)

Shouldn't be implemented.
24 (38.1%)

(I have no opinion)
26 (41.3%)

(Other: please comment)
0 (0.0%)

Comments

[ratcreature]

I don't see why this is needed when you can already get the notifications as email if that's the format you prefer.

[erik]

Because dealing with the email copies does not deal with the DW inbox copies; they still pile up in the DW inbox.

[ratcreature]

I just ignore those for the most part, unless I seem to be missing notifications because something landed in the spam or got delayed, then I check on the site. For me it would not be worth having to deal with yet another password, and settings. (I assume that the email password would need to be separate from the journal password.)

[erik]

I ignore them too. But then (as you say) occasionally I have to dig through them all to find something, using that cumbersome interface.

Why would the IMAP password be different? You're accessing the same account....

[denise]

FYI, what I do with those is use the "filter to this entry" link and then use the "delete all" button -- it can clear out your inbox remarkably quickly. Or, use the "Entries & Comments" filter on the left-hand side of the inbox, and then use the "delete all" button.

(And yes, we do have a bug open to allow people to set notifications to bypass the inbox -- it's a lot harder than it looks, especially since we can't just apply LJ's patches directly to our code anymore.)

[erik]

I guess my real problem is that when LJ introduced this "feature", I thought it was unnecessary; a way to try to make me look at more ads. This suggestion is—for me—a request for an easier way to manage an annoyance. I still don't see what actual purpose it serves. Can you help me understand?

[matgb]

Different things to different people. To you and me, we want everything emailed to us. To others,t hey don't want anything emailed to them from the site, ever (I've seen arguments about privacy, shared email accounts, other things). Some people loath email with a passion and just about manage webmail but get annoyed by spam.

When it was introduced, it also allowed us to be notified of stuff we couldn't be previously-for example, I'm subscribed to every comment made on this entire comm, that's part of the same feature that created the inbox. I regularly subscribe to comments made on a specific post and find that very useful.

But for some people, they really don't want to be emailed, at all, and want everything managed on site. Plus, giving out email addresses directly is viewed by many as a privacy concern, some people only want their email shared to people they trust and don't want multiple email accounts (these people are not me, you can google my home address and phone number), so the ability to contact people directly and privately on site and then have the site email you is, for those people, good.

FWIW, Brad had been working on the feature for a long time before 6A bought LJ, and so ads weren't anything to do with initial motivation, although it was 6A's money that let the thing actually be finished, although I'm told the code has never been what you might call 'good'.

[denise]

matgb mentioned reasons for the tracking system as a whole, but (as I was there at the time) I can tell you precisely why LJ introduced the inbox in particular: many email providers would eat mail from LJ, or treat it like spam, because LJ sent out so much email that many providers thought the high volume indicated they/we were spammy spammers who spammed. So, the inbox was a method for collecting all your comment replies/notices of things you wanted to be notified about in addition to having an email sent to you, in case the email went astray.

Many people, myself included, use the inbox as a "oh yeah I wanted to reply to that" collector -- I clean out my inbox once every few days and delete the comments I know I'm not going to reply to or the comments I know I've already replied to, and what's left is essentially a to-do list.

[musyc]

Many people, myself included, use the inbox as a "oh yeah I wanted to reply to that" collector

Guilty.

[deborah]

see, I could get some utility out of it, but only if we could control what goes to it. For example, I find it much more difficult to deal with direct messages when they are in this inbox with all of these notifications I don't want there. I understand that I can filter, but I still find that extra step to make my life more difficult. If I could configure what arrives in my inbox, then it would become useful to me.

[erik]

Ah! I see the utility, especially the part about email being blocked. I just wish it was made optional, instead of another housekeeping task forced upon me.

But having it be available via IMAP would do an end-run around the email blockers as well, no? Your DW mail/notifications would (could) appear in your email program...

[denise]

The issue is, having to run an IMAP (or POP) server is something else that's not directly connected to our main mission, something we're not very good at (none of us have any real experience with mail protocols; although most of us have run mail servers in the past, that's totally different than generating the things that will appear through the server), and something that doesn't carry a tremendous amount of value-added. To borrow an oft-mocked term from management-speak, it's not playing to our core competencies and it's not something that improves the site as a whole for everybody (only a very few people, mostly geeks, would use this, and while we're not opposed to implementing things that make life easier for a few people, we are opposed to implementing things that only affect a few people when it takes on a lot of maintenance and upkeep in areas that we're not very experienced in).

An example here is the old "LJTalk" jabber server -- very few people used it because they all had their own messaging systems already and it fell prey to the bootstrap problem, and maintaining the server (which had to be custom-built to support the LJ integration) was something that nobody really cared about and nobody was good at. Result, something that was down more often than it was up and that made LJ look bad because it wasn't very well maintained. We don't want to get into that pattern unless there's a very compelling reason for it.

The core impetus of your suggestion seems to be "make the inbox accessible via IMAP so I can clean it out more easily", which isn't a highly compelling argument to me, mostly because we do have a bug already open to revamp the notifications system so that you can bypass inbox notification. (LJ has already done this, but it's a massive undertaking and we've diverged far enough from LJ that we can't import their patches anymore.) Absent a much stronger reason why this would be a good thing for the majority of the users (not just a few outliers), I really don't think this would be a good use of our time.

[erik]

Allowing things not go to the inbox would certainly be better. Better than what is there now, and probably better than spending effort implementing my suggestion.

However. While "making it easy to clean out all that junk" is certainly a main impetus, it's by no means the only one. I just feel (as thorfinn below seems to) that things that look like mail should be manageable with mail tools. Mail is a robust and mature system of protocols for which many powerful tools already exist.

The fact that mail is not part of DW's core competency seems to me to be a fairly compelling argument for offloading the notifications to some existing server software and protocols, rather than continuing to refine this wheel someone reinvented.

[green_knight]

I haven't voted yet - my first impulse was 'oh, yes, PLEASE' because there are 1500 things in my inbox and most of them are notifications and I've completely lost track of them' but I will vote 'with changes' and add my voice to those who want to see the system revamped to make comment management easier.

Because of the now 1300 things (I deleted circle changes wholesale) it now says all (1385) Messages (10) Entries and comments (548). What I really want to filter out and delete wholesale are the crosspost successful/not successful messages, but I can't select them.

So better choices which messages we receive (email only, inbox only e-mail and inbox) and better inbox management tools, please.

[denise]

There are already bugs for all of those. (The problem is that the notification system is very, very complex, and requires someone with a lot of experience to make changes in it.)

[havocthecat]

Way back when, my company blocked all web email sites. My company did not block the LJ or DW inbox. Because of that, I used the inbox to manage my LJ and DW comments for a very long time.

This may be an unnecessary "feature" that annoys you, but it's actually something that can be rather useful to other people.

[arethinn]

And yes, we do have a bug open to allow people to set notifications to bypass the inbox

YAY. "Delete all" helps, but I'd really rather they weren't accumulating in the first place.

[matgb]

One specific reason, you can't really reply to messages by email, you have to go into the inbox.

I, personally, don't mind either way, I don't use the inbox much, just for stuff I don't care about, however it would be nice to be able to reply by email to messages sent.

Another counterpoint-other social sites, like Facebook, are integrating their messaging setup into email, but doing it ignoring standards-I see DWs biggest competitor moving forward is likely to be sites like G+, etc.

So I'm going to tick yes to this, but it's avery soft yes, I think it'd be a massive project so unless there're people wanting to do it that wouldn't work on other things, then it'd need to be a business decision style yes from Denise-if it's to be done, it'd need to be done specifically as a sales point/business decision, and it'd need to be done properly and well.

[ninetydegrees]

There's a bug to allow notifications to skip the Inbox. I'd like this much better.

[cesy]

+1

The inbox is not meant to be email, and I don't want another thing to encourage people to think it is.

[sorchasilver]

+1

[majoline]

+1

[turlough]

+1

[melannen]

IIRC from the last time I messed with POP/IMAP, it would also make it easy to have a locally-stored backup of your inbox, which I would greatly appreciate (As I don't believe any of the current journal-backup utilities will do that.)

[thorfinn]

+1

I like IMAP a lot for anything that looks like an inbox. (Hate POP, actually, I think it's outright bad and needs to go away, but that's a whole other irrelevant discussion.) :-)

[erik]

I totally agree with you about POP. I mentioned it merely to provide an alternative in case the main objection was "IMAP is hard for us to implement because of...X, Y, Z"

[thorfinn]

*nodnod* I have a feeling IMAP may be non-trivial to implement because the backing store for the DW inbox is nothing like mail... :-) It would be easiest to simply ditch the existing backing store and use a real mail back end, but that has a whole huge bunch of other issues (like making a whole bunch of stuff in the current inbox not work the way it currently does).

I love this idea, I just have a feeling it will be difficult to implement.

[liv]

I voted no mainly because I would vastly, vastly prefer to see the bug resolved for notifications to skip the inbox. That would be a far better solution to this problem.