feature request: remind me of this message in [time]

[brainwane]

One thing Slack does that I have found useful: the chevron-type menu for an individual message/post includes an option to remind me of that message in [various time options], e.g., 1 week from today. At that time I get an email notification with a link & at least the start of the text of that message.

I'd love this in Zulip.

[showell]

There's kind of a high bar for getting new features into the chevron menu. If you want to make this happen, I'd consider rallying some support on Zulip. There are a couple ways to tackle reminders:

• Instead of Zulip sending the reminder, we should integrate with a calendar app.
• Some sites may already have reminder bots.
• Do we implement this as part of the "star" feature? (Does Slack have "starring"?)
• Do we just want a more general feature to email Zulips? (and then let the email client handle deferring the send to a week from now or whatever)

[timabbott]

@brainwane do you think being reminded in a configurable period of time is the right model, or is what you're looking for really a way to just keep track of a message you want to process later? The reason I ask is that we've been talking about modifying or splitting the starring feature to be framed as more of a "messages to come back to" sort of feature where we show the count of remaining starred/followup messages. From how I imagine using the "remind me" feature, it'd be primarily for things I want to come back to after catching up on the current message list...

[timabbott]

@showell we can always make a "more" option if we want to avoid cluttering up the action list too much. I think we do need a feature in this problem space, just not sure what precisely it should be.

[showell]

Yeah, I know we can add a "more...", but then you're burying the feature, which is fine if it's kind of an advanced use case, I suppose.

But, yeah, I really think there's a bigger question here, like how can we generalize the problems statement beyond email reminders, or can we tackle "remembering messages" and "trigger emails" as two mostly separate problems?

[timabbott]

Yeah, agreed.

As a sidenote, I believe Slack's "remind me" feature comes in the form of a Slack PM, not an email, so that's a difference between @brainwane's proposal and what Slack does today.

[showell]

When all three of us are on ztn at the same time, we should do a public brainstorm on this. I think it is generally a good policy to simply emulate Slack when their features are reasonable, so I don't want to overthink this too much, but I do want to talk it out.

[xpac1985]

Digging up this old feature request: I'd appreciate some kind of reminder bot/function, I use it regularly with Slack. My use case is mostly "read a message on mobile, but it requires to do something on a computer" - therefore, set it to remind me to a few hours later, or the next workday.

[timabbott]

@xpac1985 it is planned, but an approach that works pretty well for this in Zulip today is to star the message from mobile, and then look at "starred messages" when you get back to your desktop.

[pirate]

+1 this would be awesome, I'd also be down with a reddit style bot instead of a chevron menu item. That way it doesn't have to be built in, but could be an optional bot you install. The message !remindme 1 week is also nice to see publicly so you know when someone is planning to get back to something later.

[scadu]

@timabbott that's the workaround I currently use. There is one issue though. I don't always recall to check starred messages, especially when switching contexts, so it's fairly easy to lost something.

[timabbott]

There's a setting for making starred messages appear with unread-style counts:

[Mnaukal]

I would also like this feature as I don't use Zulip that often (I don't check it regularly, I only check it when I get notified). The use case for me is that I see a message that something has to be done and I can't do it right now, but I know I will have time to do it in evening, so I want to be reminded to read the message again and do it.

[drunlade]

Given this ticket is open I assume there was no traction on getting this in? I find the "Remind me" feature in Slack very useful, such as being on a call, spotting a message come in that you need to come back on but can't while on a call, so clicking "Remind me in 20 minutes" is great - I can forget about it and in 20 minutes I get a PM telling me to go look again.

[coulterpeterson]

I second that - I use Slack reminders all the time so it's nearly a must-have for our transition to Zulip

[brainwane]

@brainwane do you think being reminded in a configurable period of time is the right model, or is what you're looking for really a way to just keep track of a message you want to process later? The reason I ask is that we've been talking about modifying or splitting the starring feature to be framed as more of a "messages to come back to" sort of feature where we show the count of remaining starred/followup messages. From how I imagine using the "remind me" feature, it'd be primarily for things I want to come back to after catching up on the current message list...

I do definitely want to have some kind of in-application way to see that this is a message I want to process later. Because of the way I personally process incoming information, it's more helpful for me to get a fresh re-notification than to have a backlog silently accumulate with no active notification to me.

So I'd be fine with an "add to the process-later backlog" action, as long as I also got a reminder notification at some point telling me "hey, there are n messages awaiting. Ideally that notification could also remind me who some of them are from or give me a truncation of the first several characters of the message, to remind me what they were about.

As a sidenote, I believe Slack's "remind me" feature comes in the form of a Slack PM, not an email, so that's a difference between @brainwane's proposal and what Slack does today.

I'm sorry for being unclear. Yes, Slack does this as a private/direct message, and since I try not to pay active attention to Slack all the time and I don't turn on desktop notifications for most of the Slacks I'm in, I find out about that direct message via an email notification.

[aleksanb]

We use SlackBot reminders that post to a channel where all members of that channel can see the message. We're partially using Slack and mainly Zulip, but we have a ton of automated reminders that remind us to do stuff, and i'd love to have those on Zulip, as currently you have to hang on both slack (to get reminders) and zulip (to discuss actions arising from those reminders).

There's no plugin in the blessed zulip plugin store either to handle reminders right now.

Really looking forward to this feature.

[timabbott]

Just noting that #21810 has the specific implementation plan for this feature, which I hope we can do relatively soon now that we've done "Send later", which will share a lot of infrastructure with it.