nextcloud
Send Talk-specific e-mail for missed messages
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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.
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?
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.
@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.
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.
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.
I'm just looking for a way for Users of Nextcloud Talk to notice new messages despite not having Nextcloud Talk open 24/7. Today, with default settings, users dont get notified of new messages, making Nextcloud Talk not a viable option to coordinate collaboration in teams.
Implementing this might be complex, however, the user experience would be the opposite of complex: If you missed a message, you'd simply get notified by e-mail. It's just best practice for communication tools on the web.
And currently it's not even possible to select a notification in the general notifications menu for unread messages in the Talk app. There only seems to be an option for calls or new chats, but not unread messages. Maybe I'm missing something, can you point me to the option to receive an e-mail for new messages?
I'm not sure that cramming all notifications together is the best choice anyway: As an example, I personally like a push notification for Downloads of shared links (so I see this in the desktop app), but I don't need an e-mail for this. That is a notification that's nice to receive but also I don't care if I miss it. Chat messages are the opposite: The notification does not need to be urgent (that's where delays like 1 or 3 hours could be handy), but I don't want to miss any message. Just because people expect their messages to be read.
I fully agree with the above. I am using NextCloud for the members of an organisation in which members participate on a volunteer basis: this is not their job, it is their contribution to society, and they are not paid for it. I cannot expect them to have NextCloud open on their desktop 24/7, nor even that they open the application every day. They connect if and when they have time.
If I want Talk to be a viable communication option among members, I need to notify them automatically and by default when they have received a message addressed to them. I don't need a notification for every message in a group (because this can fast become a clutter of hundreds of notifications, many of which irrelevant), but I need a notification for every message addressed to me. Not necessarily immediately, but at least every hour or every day, because if people write to me, they expect that I will read and answer within a known time frame.
In addition to the examples given above, this is standard also in Microsoft-based systems (Teams - Outlook).
Same issue here. I use nextcloud for an opensource team. I can't ask them to keep nextcloud open all the time, and without email notifications indicating there was activity, the Talk feature is essentially worthless.
How could you have not considered something so obviously important here?
I like the current implementation!
I use it like that: Default System settings for new users -> send unread notifications as mail with Xh delay, and in Talk: per chat room setting if I want to get notifications or not.
So each user has the power to decide how and what he wants to be notified about 👍🏻
Maybe thats what you are already looking for @dmulder - the discussion above was more about separate notification settings for Talk itself. But thats not really needed.
In my opinion that would just make it much more complicated and harder to understand which "layers" of notification settings there are. It would just get too complex imho.
Checkin back two years later. I'm currently managing a project team and we're deciding on how we'll collaborate for the next year.
The dealbreaker with nextcloud Talk is again and still the notifications. If I havent missed anything, this very essential feature still seems to be missing.
I'm renting a commercial nextcloud server and also have a nextcloud high performance backend on another server. But people have other projects too and dont go check by themselves in the nextcloud talk app if anything happened. Without this feature we still have to communicate by e-mail or install some other service like mattermost or matrix.
Is there any plan to implement this at any point?
Edit: Or would a plugin be the way to go? In this thread on nextcloud help a lot of people are asking about this. Basically some service could run every day and check for unread messages in talk and notify the user by email. How would one go about this, is this something a plugin can do or do you need something like a cronjob somewhere?
| Text | Email screenshot |
|---|---|
| I really don't get your reasoning @rinurinu The emails Nextcloud is sending are basically exactly like the sample you posted from slack in the beginning. Change the notification default in the admin settings to "All messages" and then you have exactly that. It works for messages, replies, mentions, reactions and reminders |
This is good enough and would be exactly what we would make an email look if we would create one, that is exactly why it looks that way, because I back then added the notification emails exactly for this case.
Back then you mentioned:
E-Mails for general notifications are not a viable option, this becomes unusable pretty quickly
This should not be the case, maybe you misconfigured something else then.