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Maniphest T4699

Improve email interaction with Maniphest
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Description

Some of this stuff has other tasks, but the general issues with Maniphest email that I'm expecting to fix in the next pass are:

  • We ninja vanish email we can't figure out, out of fear of creating email loops if we reply to it, but should get over this and send you an error if we can't handle your message.
  • CCs from the original email should transfer to the task, insofar as we can identify accounts, if they don't already.
  • Project hashtags (#qa) in the mail body should imply assignment.
  • The "MAIL ACTIONS" header is missing from the mail we send right now, so users have no way to figure out that they can reply or which actions are available.
  • It should be more clear that !action statements must appear on the first line, or we should be more liberal about where they're allowed to appear.
  • Now that we have custom statuses and suffixes, we could let !close take optional suffixes.
  • After increasing the amount of available magic, we should document this explicitly.

Revisions and Commits

rP Phabricator
Needs RevisionD9405 made email commands extraction a bit more lax
D8692rPd9cdbdb9fae9 When we fail to process mail, tell the user about it

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Event Timeline

epriestley created this task.Mar 29 2014, 6:41 PM
epriestley raised the priority of this task from to Normal.
epriestley updated the task description. (Show Details)
epriestley added projects: Mail, Maniphest.
epriestley added subscribers: epriestley, carl, zeeg.
epriestley edited this Maniphest Task.Mar 29 2014, 6:42 PM
epriestley edited this Maniphest Task.
epriestley added a comment.Mar 29 2014, 6:55 PM

An idea which I'm not totally sold on but which might be reasonable is to keep a record of warnings which arose while processing an email (like unknown CCs, actions with no effect, etc.), and make them accessible to the author when viewing the object (maybe "Via Email" could pop up a dialog with this information). This would say stuff like:

  • You CC'd x@y.com, but no Phabricator user has that email account, so no one was CC'd.
  • You can't "!claim" this task because you already own it.

..and maybe:

  • You mentioned @alicnol, but no Phabricator user has that username, so no one was CC'd.
  • You mentioned #quatily_assueranc, but no Phabricator project has that hashtag, so no project was added.

...although that becomes a bit of a slippery slope and we don't currently support surfacing "near misses" like this from the parser pipeline.

But generally we should probably err more on the side of continuing despite warnings with email than we do from the web workflow, since users probably want comments to post even if one of their CCs is spelled wrong or whatever (and probably(?) don't want error email about minor issues like this).

epriestley edited this Maniphest Task.Apr 3 2014, 9:52 PM
epriestley edited this Maniphest Task.Apr 4 2014, 1:43 AM
epriestley updated the task description. (Show Details)Apr 11 2014, 9:47 PM
epriestley added a subscriber: dctrwatson.
btrahan closed subtask T4021: Add hastag/shortname to Projects as Resolved.May 22 2014, 6:18 PM
epriestley edited this Maniphest Task.Jun 28 2014, 3:59 AM
joshuaspence added a subscriber: joshuaspence.Jun 29 2014, 2:56 AM
talshiri added a subscriber: talshiri.Nov 19 2014, 11:16 PM
jayvdb added a subscriber: jayvdb.Feb 5 2015, 12:02 AM
epriestley closed this task as Resolved.Dec 4 2015, 7:17 PM
epriestley claimed this task.

I think this is mostly either resolved or obsoleted by "Email Commands" (Help → Email Commands in Maniphest). We also backed away from hashtags implying project associations, and that seems like it was a good call.

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