Rule of thumb for email notification content - Aplopio/rbox-zen GitHub Wiki

Broadly, there are two approaches to email notification content:

Approach 1: As if the system is telling the recipient about an action some other user did (what most systems do)

Example:

From: Recruiterbox <[email protected]>
Subject: New comment on Skype Interview with Robert Angier
Body:

John Cutter just commented on "Skype Interview with Robert Angier":
+----------------------------------------------------------+
| Blah blah blah...                                        |
+----------------------------------------------------------+

Approach 2: As if the user who did the action herself is telling the recipient (ex: github comments)

Example:

From: John Cutter <[email protected]>
Subject: Skype Interview with Robert Angier
Body:

+----------------------------------------------------------+
| Blah blah blah...                                        |
+----------------------------------------------------------+

Rbox emails have been following #1 mostly, though the sender name was being set to the user who did the action.

Both of these approaches have pros and cons:

Approach 1

Pros

• The content can be summarized in the subject
• The content and the action items can be consistent with the app UI

Cons

• Notifications about the same object (ex: interviews) fragmented across multiple email threads
• The context of the notification (like previous comments, etc) has to be manually included in the email content (like we have been doing until now)

Approach 2

Pros

• All notifications in one place, easy to understand context
• No need to manually include previous comments, etc

Cons

• The subject line would be generic; user can't decide the importance as quickly
• The content has to be rephrased to sound like from the perspective of the user who did the action.

Conclusion

However, the cons of approach 2 can be handled, or not so serious as that of approach 1. So deciding to follow approach 2 going forward.

This also means, the header and footer of the email template (rbox logo, write-to-support link, etc) have to be made subtler or removed.