Send Talk-specific e-mail for missed messages

[rinurinu]

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Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

If you get messages or mentions in Talk today, you'll only see it if you open the Talk app or happen to notice it in the countless general nextcloud activities. There should be an e-mail notification specific to Talk.

I would love to adopt Nextcloud Talk for my projects to communicate with my clients and other freelancers about topics regarding the project. Unfortunately, contacts fall out of the loop or miss new messages entirely unless they check Talk every day twice. Which no one does. I feel the lack of e-mail notifications on missed messages is the main thing preventing adoption of Nextcloud Talk in a lot of places. This means people in my projects stop communicating by Nextcloud Talk and we revert to some other channel where we are sure that messages are noticed by the recipient in the next 24 to 48 hours: Slack, E-Mail, Text message.

People expect to get an E-Mail when they get a mention or message in Trello, Slack, Github, Confluence, JIRA, Linkedin and they missed it. Why should Nextcloud Talk be any different?

Describe the solution you'd like

When something happens in Nextcloud Talk, the user gets E-Mail notifications after a certain time by default. This way, the user does not miss important stuff. The E-Mail nofitication can be disabled in Talk options.

Further details:

something happens: New messages in my chats, new mentions of my name, I'm added to a chat, a Call has been started…

E-Mail notification: The E-Mail collects the new messages. It also provides a link to disable the notification or change the time after which a notification is sent.

Certain time: immediately/1 Minute when you get a message and you don't have the Talk app open. Or if you have the app open but are in a different channel or whatever, a collection of messages after 1 to 3 hours.

By default: It's important that this is by default. It's expected behaviour, it's how it works in Slack for example. Most people have too many messengers, too many apps to use, too many places for too many projects to track.

Describe alternatives you've considered

• The standard Setting to e-mail notifications after 1 hour. This does not work because this way you get notified by e-mail about everything happening in Nextcloud. For example reminders of calendar events. This way the relevant Talk notifications get drowned out by countless other notifications deemed irrelevant in e-mail. This solution is also what was proposed as a solution to this similar issue, but as descriped above, it does not fix it.
• Keeping Nextcloud Talk open in the browser. I can't expect clients or freelancer to keep one software open 24/7 for the duration of a three month project where there might be inactivity for several weeks sometimes.

Additional context

How does Slack solve this? See these screenshots attached.

Thanks for reading and considering this feature request. I'd be happy to provide more information and also some design work for the feature if it is helpful.

[smokinjo]

This is a great idea. I am having people prefer using other chat system outside next cloud because they are unaware of new messages. The people do not use next cloud like I do, since I am the main organizer of the group, and they are in frequent users.

Could we organize and create a plug in to perform this feature?

[nickvergessen]

I think the main thing that is missing is making people aware that they are not notified by default in group conversations. Once you select to get notified for "All messages":

You will receive a notification in Nextcloud and all the clients. There is even an admin setting to change the default to be "All messages":

And the notification system has a "reminder email" option, enabled by default:

So this can be fully covered already. It's just not the default. Main reason is that we don't know the scale of Nextcloud and the default has to work as good as possible for all servers. In a home/small usecase being fully subscribed might be desirable. On our company instance I'm part of over 250 rooms with a total of over 500.000 messages. It would be far off sending me an email for each of them on daily or other basis.

[rinurinu]

@nickvergessen Thank you for researching this option. But does this then not end up in the general nextcloud notifications? I think it's very important to distinguish between e-mail notifications for just talk and those for general nextcloud notifications. E-Mails for general notifications are not a viable option, this becomes unusable pretty quickly, even in small organisations.

If there's an option for just Talk e-mails, that would be an improvement already. And you are right it should be by default.

If we want people to adopt Nextcloud talk, we need a robust default setting so people get notified when they receive messages. There's a reason it works the way it does in Slack and other apps. If this very basic feature is hidden in some option screen, people just won't adopt this tool. Especially since it's not obvious to you as a sender that people did not get notified of your message.

[nickvergessen]

E-Mails for general notifications are not a viable option, this becomes unusable pretty quickly, even in small organisations.

then you might want to reconsider your notification settings, so you only get notifications for things you care about?

It also feels weird to have 2 separate notification email mechanisms that would duplicate info, or it adds a lot of complexity to check based on the notification and setting of a "3rdparty app" if something should go the general notification email.