Community Mail Design ideas

Joseph Russo  April 3 2010 10:34:30 AM

Mailing a Community

Today in Connections Communities, there's this button “Mail Community” that let's someone send a direct email to people in the community



and it has a few aspects to it, that you may or may not be aware of ... and why they are there...



First, the link about using your favorite email client. This is merely the “mailto” type feature, that will pop up the user's current default email client with the list of the community members (or just owners, if that radio is selected). Our motivation for supporting this feature is to let you use the email client you prefer, and allows you to easily incorporate all aspects of email (like rich text, attachments, etc) in a place you're familiar with. However, there's a drawback. Since “mailto” is a URL, it has some specfic limitations, primarily that in IE they impose a maximum limit of just over 2000 characters. So with this limitation, using the mailto for a community of 200 members for example, where each member's email is on average 10 characters..well, we hit that limt...so, mailto is less than optimal.


Second, there's a “To:” link, which, if clicked pops the entire membership into a text area. This design is intended to let someone easily perform an old fashioned copy/paste and and use that list of emails as desired (like pasting into their email client).

Ok, that being said, there is a different UI experience in connections for things like notifications...where we've adopted a UI that presents a list of people, by display name, with checkboxes alongside, as shown below;




Now with this design, someone can select all or select a subset...and can also use a filter to whittle down the list of names. This interface has a couple of advantages, first being that we show the list as human readable display names (and not the potentially crypitc email addresses)...and for those of you who worry about email security, as in, please don't show my email to others, this approach provides a blind so that someone can email without knowing the recipients actual email address. Finally, one big advantage is that this is the standard connection interace for notifications by email.

So now the question is, should we drop the community mail design in favor of the more standard connections notification pattern? Also, as part of this question, I'd love to hear from you all about what, if any features from the community email form you make use of...like mailto link or expanding the To field, etc...












Finally, here's a mock up of something we could do with the community mail form if we decide to adopt the standard notification pattern;

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