Email notifications for messages in a room thread don't seem to say who the message is from

[m-natarajan]

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Version Number: 9.0.18-1 Reproducible in staging?: Y Reproducible in production?: Y If this was caught during regression testing, add the test name, ID and link from TestRail: Email or phone of affected tester (no customers): Logs: https://stackoverflow.com/c/expensify/questions/4856 Expensify/Expensify Issue URL: Issue reported by: @puneetlath Slack conversation: https://expensify.slack.com/archives/C049HHMV9SM/p1723051083119829

Action Performed:

Prerequisite: create room with member

1. Send a message from room
2. Wait for email notification for member regarding the message

Expected Result:

Message should say from whom it was received

Actual Result:

Don't seem to say who the message is from

Workaround:

Unknown

Platforms:

Which of our officially supported platforms is this issue occurring on?

• [ ] Android: Native
• [ ] Android: mWeb Chrome
• [ ] iOS: Native
• [ ] iOS: mWeb Safari
• [X] MacOS: Chrome / Safari
• [ ] MacOS: Desktop

Screenshots/Videos

Add any screenshot/video evidence

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[melvin-bot[bot]]

Triggered auto assignment to @anmurali (Bug), see https://stackoverflow.com/c/expensify/questions/14418 for more details. Please add this bug to a GH project, as outlined in the SO.

[melvin-bot[bot]]

@anmurali Huh... This is 4 days overdue. Who can take care of this?

[anmurali]

Yea this email notification is super confusing. I think ideally it should look and feel like the product right? Sorta like an IOU or money request related notification does? I received this:

I think it should look like

@Expensify/design what was this designed to look like?

[shawnborton]

Hmm I would think we should be showing the sender's avatar + name + full message like we do for other emails.

Also, in this case, why is the email coming from "Expensify Chat" if that's just the workspace name?

[melvin-bot[bot]]

@anmurali Eep! 4 days overdue now. Issues have feelings too...

[melvin-bot[bot]]

@anmurali 6 days overdue. This is scarier than being forced to listen to Vogon poetry!

[melvin-bot[bot]]

@anmurali this issue was created 2 weeks ago. Are we close to a solution? Let's make sure we're treating this as a top priority. Don't hesitate to create a thread in #expensify-open-source to align faster in real time. Thanks!

[melvin-bot[bot]]

@anmurali 8 days overdue is a lot. Should this be a Weekly issue? If so, feel free to change it!

[melvin-bot[bot]]

@anmurali 12 days overdue. Walking. Toward. The. Light...

[anmurali]

@shawnborton - doesn't my proposal https://github.com/Expensify/App/issues/47081#issuecomment-2287722637 clarify who the sender of each message is? It basically looks like the conversation in that room or group chat itself.

[shawnborton]

Hmm I'm not quite following. But I just checked some notifications from #social and does it look like they are behaving as expected? Each new notification comes from an actual person:

I'm not sure how I feel about that tbh. I would think that a group of messages would be sent from Expensify, not a singular person since there are messages from multiple people there. But if just one person sent a message, I can see where it makes sense to have the notification come from just one person?

[puneetlath]

It seems to be inconsistent for me. Sometimes it includes the avatars of the senders and sometimes it doesn't.

Here's an example where notifications for the same room sometimes included the avatar/name and sometimes didn't:

Looks like @Beamanator also experienced similar here: https://expensify.slack.com/archives/C049HHMV9SM/p1724809339227489

[melvin-bot[bot]]

@anmurali Huh... This is 4 days overdue. Who can take care of this?

[melvin-bot[bot]]

@anmurali Still overdue 6 days?! Let's take care of this!

[melvin-bot[bot]]

@anmurali 8 days overdue is a lot. Should this be a Weekly issue? If so, feel free to change it!

[anmurali]

Discussing in slack here

[melvin-bot[bot]]

Triggered auto assignment to @jasperhuangg (AutoAssignerNewDotQuality)

[jasperhuangg]

Can look into this, but need to clear off some of the existing PRs that I already have open.

[jasperhuangg]

Based on this it looks like we added specific logic to omit the avatars and display names from the notifications if they only contain a single message from a single person. This is consistent with the examples of this issue that we've been seeing in the linked Slack threads.

It looks like this was added here and was probably broken by some other logic that was added afterwards. I'll try to clean up the logic since it's pretty hard to follow atm.

[puneetlath]

Oh that's interesting. I feel like it would be better to just have it look consistent every time. Especially now that the messages come from notifications@expensify.com instead of the user themselves. But I'll defer to @shawnborton on that.

[jasperhuangg]

Especially now that the messages come from notifications@expensify.com instead of the user themselves

Yeah totally agree with this. It seems the reason we added this logic previously was because the sender's name was already in the email's "from" field. Definitely think we should defer to how we're displaying the multi-message notifications for everything now.

[shawnborton]

Yeah, I think we originally made 1:1 messages arrive without an avatar and a display name in the body because the idea was that we would send the email as if it came from the chat message sender, and I think David felt quite strongly about making the email experience feel as similar to chat as possible. But some considerations:

• we can't actually show the avatar of the sender
• I think there is a difference that we experience internally when we get these email notifications. For instance, we always have the checkmark and the app icon as our avatar:

Can someone confirm what it looks like when a non-Expensify account sends a message to someone that generates an email notification? Does that email come from notifications@expensify.com, with an Expensify avatar? If that's the case, I think it makes sense to just completely standardize on the body of the email always containing the user's avatar + display name + message.

[shawnborton]

Also cc @Expensify/design for any additional thoughts here - I think we've chatted through this one in the past.

[shawnborton]

Okay actually my test just came through - this is what it looks like when my personal account sent a message and generated a notification:

I think the fact that we are always showing the Expensify logo here makes me want to put the user's avatar in the message body, and thus standardize on everything. But notice that we still send the message from my display name.

I think my vote would be to standardize the message template by always showing an avatar and sender name in the body but we should socialize this idea in Slack first and make sure everyone is on board with it first.

[dubielzyk-expensify]

Can someone confirm what it looks like when a non-Expensify account sends a message to someone that generates an email notification? Does that email come from notifications@expensify.com, with an Expensify avatar? If that's the case, I think it makes sense to just completely standardize on the body of the email always containing the user's avatar + display name + message.

I got this when testing with a friend from Concierge, but this was sent from my friend. Not sure if that's a bug or feature.

My thoughts on this is aligned with you and Danny I believe. I largely find our whole email experience extremely confusing. Some have avatars and some don't, some send from Expensify, some from a user's name.

I think we should be sending the emails all from Expensify with the avatar and sender as Expensify, then embed the user avatar and message within the body of the message at the least to make all the messages consistent.