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jstanden
[Mail/HTML] Option to collapse long messages with 'show quotes' in HTML mode
This would be a huge boon for us at AgileBits as we often have complex tickets going back and forth and I'm pretty sure my scrolling finger is now feeling the RSI pain due to this.
I've disabled the HTML mode for the moment but it would be nice to switch back when this is added.
Hey @Mike-AgileBits!
Probably unsurprisingly, I think bots would be a good way to handle this. We could have an event when displaying messages where bots can modify the HTML output, and then we can build up a shared behavior for common quoting patterns.
If you're able to share some anonymized HTML message parts with quoted content, I'd be happy to include them.
Would you like me to include it here or send it via email?
It's mostly nested blockquotes.
Whatever is easy for you. Blockquotes should be really easy to handle in the collapse code.
Hi @jstanden,
Here's the HTML file and you can also view the ticket on our instance, ticket mask: CCD-26532-246.
<html><head><meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=us-ascii"></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;" class="">This is the second customer reply to the staff's second reply. <br class=""><div><br class=""><blockquote type="cite" class=""><div class="">On Sep 11, 2017, at 7:41 AM, AgileBits Support <<a href="mailto:[email protected]" class="">[email protected]</a>> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div class=""><div id="body" style="font-family:Arial, Verdana, sans-serif;font-size:10pt;" class=""><p class="">This is the second reply to the customer's first reply. </p><p class="">On Mon, 11 Sep 2017, <a href="mailto:[email protected]" class="">[email protected]</a> wrote:</p>
<blockquote style="border-left:1px solid rgb(0,128,255);color:rgb(0,128,255);font-style:italic;margin-left:0px;padding-left:5px;" class=""><p class="">This is the customer's reply to the first staff's reply.</p>
<blockquote style="border-left:1px solid rgb(0,128,255);color:rgb(0,128,255);font-style:italic;margin-left:0px;padding-left:5px;" class=""><p class="">On Sep 11, 2017, at 7:31 AM, AgileBits Support <a href="mailto:[email protected]" style="color:rgb(0,128,255);" class="">[email protected]</a><br class="">
wrote:</p><p class="">This is a response to the initial email.</p><p class="">On Mon, 11 Sep 2017, <a href="mailto:[email protected]" class="">[email protected]</a> wrote:</p><p class="">Hello. This is the initial email.</p>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
</div>
</div></blockquote></div><br class=""></body></html>
From a recent convo in support:
It's just tricky because of the myriad formats the quoted sections can take in HTML formatted messages.
I think one interesting option would be training a classifier to recognize them. You could highlight a section of an HTML message during rendering and tag it as quoted text. The classifier could learn those formats -- without us having to hardcode them. It could collapse your selection immediately too (possibly by just injecting a harmless container around it which only has an effect in the Cerb UI).
That will be easier when we launch automations, since it'd be easier to provide the events during message rendering, and the tagging functionality.
We're already working on something like that for tagging passages in messages so bots would be able to automatically suggest snippets/solutions/resources within drafts. For instance, the bot could generate a draft for you with the right group/bucket/owner/status/reopen/customfields AND callout quote some sentences with suggested responses to common questions.
Something else we're working on for a couple enterprise clients is an #original_message command in replies. That works like signature, but it injects the full plaintext or HTML of the original message at that position without you having to deal with it in the reply window. Some (borderline crazy) clients want to quote huge Outlook threads at the bottom of every message, in HTML. That command is a way to support that without wrecking the reply editor.
That's also related, because that gives the ability to send that bloated content in the outgoing message but not save it with each stored message in Cerb. In that case, you'd only need to hide big HTML blocks from incoming replies, not outgoing ones.
This is all definitely something we're working. It's just far more involved to hide arbitrary quotes in HTML than it is to condense plaintext lines indented with >.
We would find this very useful as well. Customers often send screenshots inline and it's much easier to follow along in HTML mode, but the quoted text gets in the way after a ticket has gone back and forth more than a couple of times.
