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

[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.)