launchpadblog

Users of some email clients, particularly Gmail, have long had a problem filtering mail from Launchpad effectively.  We put lots of useful information into our message headers so that heavy users of Launchpad can automatically filter email into different folders.  Unfortunately, Gmail and some other clients do not support filtering mail on arbitrary headers, only on message bodies and on certain pre-defined headers such as Subject.  Figuring out what to do about this has been tricky.  Space in the Subject line is at a premium – many clients will only show a certain number of characters at the start, and so inserting filtering tags at the start would crowd out other useful information, so we don’t want to do that; and in general we want to avoid burdening one group of users with workarounds for the benefit of another group because that doesn’t scale very well, so we had to approach this with some care.

As of our most recent code update, you’ll find a new setting on your “Change your personal details” page:

If you check “Include filtering information in email footers”, Launchpad will duplicate some information from message headers into the signature part (below the dash-dash-space line) of message bodies: any “X-Launchpad-Something: value” header will turn into a “Launchpad-Something: value” line in the footer.  Since it’s below the signature marker, it should be relatively unobtrusive, but is still searchable.  You can search or filter for these in Gmail by putting the key/value pair in double quotes, like this:

At the moment this only works for emails related to Bazaar branches, Git repositories, merge proposals, and build failures.  We intend to extend this to a few other categories soon, particularly bug mail and package upload notifications.  If you particularly need this feature to work for some other category of email sent by Launchpad, please file a bug to let us know.

Tags: email, front-page

This entry was posted by Colin Watson on Wednesday, July 29th, 2015 at 4:43 pm and is filed under Notifications. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.