People anwering per email to notifications about PNs - how to avoid?

[smallwheels]

When a forum member receives a private message he will be notified via email about that fact in most cases. The mail is sent from the general forum mail account (in my case forum@<domain>) Sometimes people will hit "answer" in their email program to answer the pn - which then leads to whatever they wrote ending up in the forum mail inbox and not in the pn inbox of the original sender - double problem: Communication doomed w/o the parties involved knowing about it and I see the private content of conversations I am neither supposed to see nor interested in seeing.

The notification mail contains a footer that says: "Please don't answer to this mail, to answer to the private message you have to visit the forum". Still some people ignore that - it is a usability error that seems understandable.

The question is: How to deal with this?

• manually forwarding the message to the correct recepient via mail or forum message is not feasible, not reliable (and does not seem adequate anyway)
• implementing a way that replying via email would reach the correct recepient would be optimal, but does not seem feasible either (plus it would need a lot of programming and thinking)
• using a sender address that does not exist (and thus cannot receive replies) for those notifications could be a possibility but would not be rfc-conform and create other problems. As far as I know it cannot be configured explicitely for those kind of notifications.
• possibly the best way would be to make it more explicit that a reply via email wont work. This can be achieved two fold:

1. making the footer more prominent (bigger font size, black instead of subtle grey)
2. change the button "visit the forum to view the conversation" to "answer to this message" (or add a button with this content additionally).
Both won't technically hinder people from answering per mail but hopefully will bring down the occurance.

How do you deal with this issue? Have you found an effective way? Where would I change the writing on the button and how wold I add another button to the mail template?

 

[ENF]

In the event that someone replies to the email that sent the DM notification, we have a boiler-plate message that basically says that this message won't be seen by anyone. At the same time, it provides links to common things such as DM's (inbox), the login page and also a link to a custom help page that instructs people what to do when encounter this message. It's just a catch-all auto-reply to any mail that makes it way to that specific address.

We have not otherwise changed any design of the DM text or format other than applying our own styling.

 

[AndyB]

When a direct message notification email is received, the "Please do not reply to this message" message is too faint and often users will overlook this important notice.

Edit the direct_message_email_html_footer phrase.

Change this:

<p class="minorText">Please do not reply to this message. You must visit the forum to reply.</p>

To this:

<div style="background:#ccc;padding:10px;">Please do not reply to this message. You must visit the forum to reply.</div>

Result:

 

[smallwheels]

Edit the direct_message_email_html_footer phrase.

Almost, the phrase seems to be "conversation_email_html_footer". I'll give it a shot! Thanks!

 

[Pauly]

Almost, the phrase seems to be "conversation_email_html_footer". I'll give it a shot! Thanks!

Depends what version of XF you are running

 

[Pauly]

I remove the content of the message so they have to login to the forum to read it

 

[smallwheels]

Depends what version of XF you are running

I am still on 2.2.17

I remove the content of the message so they have to login to the forum to read it

Clearly 100% effective and a lot of platforms do that. However, from a user perspective I've always found that annoying, thinking: If you write me a mail to tell me I got a message - why on earth don't you tell me the content but instead try to trick me into visiting your platform?

 

[rogerl]

I remove the content of the message so they have to login to the forum to read it

That is the only way I have found that works, and it has the bonus that they visit the forum and can interact whilst there.
We also have the exclude the text in watched thread/forum notifications set for the same reason.