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Opened 6 years ago

Closed 3 years ago

#3259 closed defect (bug) (reported-upstream)

Gmail adds different emails from contact forms in the same thread

Reported by: casiepa's profile casiepa Owned by: casiepa's profile casiepa
Milestone: Priority: normal
Component: WordCamp Site & Plugins Keywords: needs-patch
Cc:

Description

When creating a contact form on a wordcamp site and forwarding the form content to a gmail address, gmail is grouping different forms together in the same thread, making it difficult to work on the inbox. All emails have the same subject ( [aH6FlOBO] WordCamp Contact Request ) except for the unique ID in between the brackets.

Looking around for explanations, the best one I found was :

Gmail joins messages into conversations based entirely and only on the subject content.
It sometimes does not join messages together if there are time gaps between them.

It never joins messages together in a conversation if the subject line is different except when the subject begins with a phrase within square brackets!!
Gmail ignores the square bracketed part to assist in the handling of messages from Google groups.

So as the unique ID between the brackets is skipped, the subject is the same and multiple email are going together in the same thread in gmail.

Attachments (1)

3259.diff (671 bytes) - added by casiepa 6 years ago.
Remove brackets in the subject

Download all attachments as: .zip

Change History (18)

@casiepa
6 years ago

Remove brackets in the subject

#1 @casiepa
6 years ago

  • Keywords has-patch added

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #meta-wordcamp by casiepa. View the logs.


6 years ago

#3 @mrwweb
6 years ago

As I mentioned on Slack:

I selectively did this for a few of our forms with Seattle and it did seem to helwork. For instance, the speaker application subject was "[asdfasdf] WordCamp Speaker Application: {title}, {name}"

I didn't know the Gmail issue with brackets. That definitely sounds like it'll fix the technical problem.

From a pure email management perspective, I'd suggest we update the default subject lines to include at least the sender/submitter/applicant/purchaser name for easier reference and searching. That may require a different change to the default content, but I thought I'd mention it here in case it's appropriate to make both changes at once.

In the same vein, could the random string appear at the end of the subject so it doesn't distract from the part intended for humans?

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #meta-wordcamp by iandunn. View the logs.


6 years ago

#5 @iandunn
6 years ago

That's a good point to bring up, Mark. I think adding something like {name} and {title} would be more user-friendly than a random string.

We'd probably need to check if those fields exist in the form, though, and also that they weren't already added manually. If either of those fail, then maybe we fall back to a random string? It'd also be good to check for variations like {first_name}, etc.

I think it'd be nice to have the random string be something like (id:f3Jfmsad) rather than just the number, to make it a little more less confusing for users. The parenthesis help visually separate it and make it feel like a distinct part, and the id explains a little bit about why it's there. We'd need to make sure that Gmail (and other clients) don't ignore things in parenthesis either, though. If they do, we could maybe do it like -- id:f3Jfmsad instead.

#6 @casiepa
6 years ago

I already moved it to the end in my attached patch (space dash space and then the unique ID)

I will look into those extra fields to add as a quick win, great find!

#7 @casiepa
6 years ago

I tried the following and it worked perfectly:

[contact-form to='hello@…,myself@…' subject='VISA Application Form - {Last Name} {Given Name}'][contact-field label='Last Name' type='text' required='1'/][contact-field label='Given Name' type='text' required='1'/][contact-field label='Date of Birth (dd/mm/yyyy)' type='text' required='1'/][contact-field label='Home Address' type='textarea' required='1'/][contact-field label='Passport Number' type='text' required='1'/]contact-form

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #meta-wordcamp by coreymckrill. View the logs.


6 years ago

#9 @coreymckrill
6 years ago

  • Owner set to casiepa
  • Status changed from new to assigned

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #meta-wordcamp by casiepa. View the logs.


6 years ago

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #meta-wordcamp by iandunn. View the logs.


5 years ago

#12 @iandunn
5 years ago

The patch needs some minor work based on Slack discussion linked above.

#13 @iandunn
5 years ago

  • Keywords needs-patch added; has-patch removed

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #meta-wordcamp by iandunn. View the logs.


4 years ago

This ticket was mentioned in Slack in #meta-wordcamp by casiepa. View the logs.


4 years ago

#16 @dd32
4 years ago

Is this still an issue? Gmail updated in early 2019 to require the References: or In-Reply-To: headers to be set in order for threading to kick in: https://gsuiteupdates.googleblog.com/2019/03/threading-changes-in-gmail-conversation-view.html (That references GSuite, but every article I can find says it's "gmail")

#17 @dd32
3 years ago

  • Resolution set to reported-upstream
  • Status changed from assigned to closed

This ticket has been moved to GitHub https://github.com/WordPress/wordcamp.org/issues/595

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