show read-received information

[drjakob]

As editor I want to see if my messages have been delivered and read. Please show checkmarks

[mattwr18]

@drjakob do you have an idea how we want to handle Telegram? We don't receive delivery receipts from them. We mark the message as received when it reaches the Telegram servers, but we don't really know that the recipient received the message or not, and we definitely don't know when/if they read it.

I am concerned that the UI will be a bit confusing considering we have this lack of information for one of our channels.

Also, a concern with email since we won't even pretend to mark them.

[soey]

If I understand correctly you have sent, received, read status. And depending on the channel the later information will probably be nonexistent. From my experience: I would try to be as transparent as possible and never show information that you don't have. This will only lead to trouble. My proposal would be to use the existing pattern that is used by WhatsApp and Signal and pivot it slightly, so that you can also show "NULL" information. Whatsapp:

Ein grauer Haken bedeutet, die Nachricht wurde versendet, ist aber noch nicht beim Empfänger angekommen. Zwei graue Haken bedeuten, die Nachricht wurde zugestellt, aber noch nicht gelesen. Zwei blaue Haken bedeuten die Nachricht wurde gelesen. 100 Eyes Proposal: Same as above for channels where the information is given. I would go with "blau" if we have the final information. So it would be "Ein blauer Haken bedeutet dass die Nachricht versendet wurde und keine weiteren Informationen für diesen Kanal verfügbar sind."

What do you think?

[mattwr18]

Hey @soey ... sorry for such a late reply here. We've discussed this in our standup and I've just now translated the message :point_up: to make sure I understood correctly.

I have some outstanding doubts about this.

• Until now, we have discussed not keeping track of email. I did not previously look into the possibility of tracking received/read statuses with Postmark. I have now done so and it is possible for us to receive webhooks with this info. I think we should track this for all available channels, when possible. Should we create an issue for this or is there some reason we actively don't want to extend this to email?
• For Telegram, we have discussed this, but I am still unsure. We do not receive delivery receipts from Telegram via the Bot API, so at the moment we mark a message as received when it is sent, and does not return an error. I understood from previous conversations that we would only want to display to the client that the message was sent since in fact we don't know if it was actually received by the contributor. Is that what you would suggest? If so, I think we would want to revert the change that marks the message as received so that we can check that a message was created to display the sent UI, that it was marked received to display the received UI, and finally that it was read.

I don't think we should change the UI from what every messenger uses. One checkmark means sent, but not received, this would be particularly useful in our case since for Telegram and/or Postmark, depending on :point_up: . Two checkmarks would mean received and two checkmarks with a visible color change for read.

• I assumed we would use icons for this, but the icon library we use does not have any options that even come close to the proposed UI. We also do not have any custom icons from the design team that provided us with icons around a year ago. We could achieve something similar with unicode, at least for a single checkmark, but I think it would be better to have svg.

[soey]

As we talked today: a) For emails it depends on the recipient clients settings if it sends a confirmation. It's up to you to decide if you want to add this now as a follow up or leave it out if it requires to much work. b)Yes please revert the change and don't mark that as received on sending. c) Either you look on some free icons on the web that comes close to this or you use a text (versendet|empfangen|gelesen)