I receive a lot of task mail notifications (plain text format) as I am a triager. And I even read most of them!
Pretty often I know after reading the very first lines only that I want to open the task in my browser and perform some actions there (ask followup questions to non-techy reporter, correct some metadata, etc).
To do that I need to open the task's URL, preferably by clicking on it in the email.
The current notification mail structure is:
User created this task. User added subscribers: Alice, Bob. User added a project: Foobar TASK DESCRIPTION Imagine a long description here over 30 lines, e.g. with a code example. TASK DETAIL https://phabricator.example.com/T987654321 REPLY HANDLER ACTIONS Reply to comment or attach files, or !close, !claim, !unsubscribe or !assign <username>. EMAIL PREFERENCES https://phabricator.example.com/settings/panel/emailpreferences/ To: User Cc: Alice, Bob
Problem: The URL is somewhere in the middle of everything, yet (apart from replying to the task via email) is the most important item in order to start a followup action. Taking action does not sound uncommon as you mainly follow tasks because you want to interact with / react to other stakeholders.
Currently I need to scroll down to reach the end of the email, and then go several lines up again with my eyes to find the URL and click it.
I've managed several times now to click on the email preferences link instead.
Request: I wished that the task URL was among the very first lines (before the TASK DESCRIPTION). And if there are good reasons to really not do that, should the URL be the very last line at least?