[PSA] Improvement to Monorail email notifications From-line

[Jason Robbins]

If you don’t read Monorail issue notification emails, you can stop reading now.

The format of the From-line in Monorail notification emails is being changed to allow Gmail to better display the username of the user who made the change.  This resolves issue monorail:1465.  You do not need to do anything to benefit from this change.

Details:

In the old format, Gmail displayed the full email address of the user who made the change. Unfortunately, that took up the entire width of the sender column in the Gmail inbox UI,  so only the address of the first user could fit.  Later comments on the same issue were not visible, which made it look like all comments came from the issue reporter.  E.g., notifications about an issue with three comments might look like they were from:

“a-u...@chromium.org vi. (4)”

In the new format, Gmail displays just the username rather than the full email address.  Project members still see the full email address in the body of the email and on the issue.  Since each username is shorter, more can fit in the Gmail UI, and unread messages in a thread can be indicated with bold.  E.g. for that same example issue:

“A-user, B-user, C-user, D. (4)”

Under the covers, we are changing both the “friendly” part of the From: line and the email address of the sender.  We originally used sender mono...@chromium.org for all notification emails.  Now we use monorail+...@chromium.org so that gmail treats them as distinct contacts.  If you search for, or have any filters looking for [From:mono...@chromium.org], they should still match the new plus-address senders.

Known issue: You may see some email senders rendered as “monorai.” in the Gmail UI.  That is a consequence of the way that Gmail handles threads that contain both our old and new From-line format.  You will need to view the message body to see the older senders, which is actually the same as the situation before this change.  You will see this less frequently over time as you work with new issues that use only the new format.

If you encounter problems due to this change, please report an issue at https://bugs.chromium.org/p/monorail

This change is not related to any delivery failures for email replies that happened yesterday or earlier today.  Those were due to an unrelated problem that has been resolved.

Thanks,

jason!

[Devlin Cronin]

Thanks, Jason!  It was really bothersome to only see one user for all updates, so this is great.  One small nit: Can we not capitalize the username?  For whatever reason, seeing Jrobbins instead of jrobbins or jrobbins@ looks surprisingly weird.

On Thursday, July 21, 2016 at 3:18:09 PM UTC-7, Jason Robbins wrote:

If you don’t read Monorail issue notification emails, you can stop reading now.

The format of the From-line in Monorail notification emails is being changed to allow Gmail to better display the username of the user who made the change.  This resolves issue monorail:1465.  You do not need to do anything to benefit from this change.

Details:

In the old format, Gmail displayed the full email address of the user who made the change. Unfortunately, that took up the entire width of the sender column in the Gmail inbox UI,  so only the address of the first user could fit.  Later comments on the same issue were not visible, which made it look like all comments came from the issue reporter.  E.g., notifications about an issue with three comments might look like they were from:

“a-u...@chromium.org vi. (4)”

In the new format, Gmail displays just the username rather than the full email address.  Project members still see the full email address in the body of the email and on the issue.  Since each username is shorter, more can fit in the Gmail UI, and unread messages in a thread can be indicated with bold.  E.g. for that same example issue:

“A-user, B-user, C-user, D. (4)”

Under the covers, we are changing both the “friendly” part of the From: line and the email address of the sender.  We originally used sender mono...@chromium.org for all notification emails.  Now we use monorail+UNIQUE_ID@chromium.org so that gmail treats them as distinct contacts.  If you search for, or have any filters looking for [From:mono...@chromium.org], they should still match the new plus-address senders.

[Christian Biesinger]

Thanks for this change! Could I also request to drop the "via Monorail" part of the sender name? That is just useless noise that takes up a lot of space.

-Christian