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Published 20 hours ago • verified publisher icon thunderbird

[EPIC] In-app error notifications

Open kewisch opened this issue 9 months ago • 3 comments
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🎯 The objective

Inform the user of errors that occurred while the app was performing foreground or background operations.

A major release feedback item is that emails are not arriving reliably. In part, this is because the app doesn’t always inform the user when an error occurs.

🎒 Resources

🦮 Rules of the Road

🟢 In Scope

  • Investigate UX patterns for showing errors or state failures
  • Move away from (exclusively) using system notifications
  • If there are folder errors, indicate this in the drawer somehow
  • Error types:
    • Authentication error
    • Certificate error
    • Sync failures / Connectivity Issues
      • Figure out how prominently to notify the user. When they take an action explicitly (e.g. refresh), then be more on the nose. If syncs happen in the background focus more on “last updated”.
      • Potentially notify for ongoing issues

🔴 Out of Scope

  • New UI/UX for dealing with certain errors, e.g. new screen to update credentials after an authentication error

🚧 Technical and/or Business Requirements

  • Keep the scope as small as possible so we can quickly ship something that is useful to users.
  • Make the in-app error notification mechanism flexible enough so it can be used for addition error types in the future. Examples:
    • Sending a message has failed
    • Uploading a message has failed
    • Marking a message as read has failed
    • Moving a message has failed
    • Deleting a message has failed
    • Fetching the list of folders has failed

Project tasks

Cross-Functional Tasks

🎨 Design

  • Develop a design for the new in-app notification area

🤝 Support - Product

  • Update SUMO articles to better describe the new error situations

kewisch avatar Feb 18 '25 14:02 kewisch

Please also include #3949

ccpp avatar Mar 11 '25 23:03 ccpp

I've added it to the resources list. For this project we'll mostly create the infrastructure and start writing down what we want to use it for. We'll then file/re-open/ follow up issues for the error types we want to show there. The openkeychain issue might be more in the stretch area, but generally it makes sense to notify about this.

kewisch avatar Mar 12 '25 11:03 kewisch

yes, it would be very helpful, older users don't exactly use notifications but expect the app to tell them something went wrong. They will miss error notifications and assume the message was sent successfully.

also maybe find a way to translate the errors, too. atleast the typical ones: attachment too large is currently:

Requested mail action aborted: exceeded storage allocation Mail size limit exceeded

Which is harder to understand for (non-technical) English speakers already, now expect a German senior ^^

another error message could be: mail rejected by recipient due to spam detection Though I'm not sure what the exact error message is in that case. It's probably received and you get an answer mail by the postmaster. So maybe this one's impossible.

Anyways thanks for merging all of these many issues/duplicates into one big issue/milestone

Djfe avatar Mar 27 '25 14:03 Djfe