The design of email notifications is broken

[Terje Nilima Mo]

Hello.

Is it just me or is the notification system designe broken. I believe that this goes back to when templates were first introduced, and back then they couldn't include items from individual notifications. This fault has created unnecessary many templates, which I believe is what Layouts is attempting to remedy. However, if you are going to fix it, it should be fixed correctly.

In my opinion layout should be company wide and used across departments to ensure a uniform look and feel to notifications.

Templates should be department (or team) wide to encapsulate notification elements that are common for all department tickets and includes the signature for the notification.

The notification should be notification specific. This because when a notification is sent also indicates why it was sent, and as such it is natural to have this text specified here.

I have created this illustration for how I believe the notifications should be built:

<Layout>

----- edits between these lines are not recorded -----

[header_image]

${template.body}

[footer_image]

You may see your ticket in the portal by clicking this link. {script: get_link}

----- edits between these lines are not recorded -----

<Template>

Hello ${caller.first_name}.

${notifcation.body}

Best regards

The department support team

https://department.support.company.com

department.support@company.com

+1 234 56 789

Here is a summary of your ticket:
${short_description}

${description}

<Notification>

We have received your email and will process it as soon as possible.

Alternatives for <Notification> could be:

---

Your ticket has been updated by ${sys_updated_by}:

${mailscript:get_last_comment}

---

Your ticket has been resolved by ${sys_updated_by}.

${close_notes}

---

This way we can use one layout for all departments templates, and all departments’ templates can be adjusted by the layout if the footer image changes.

Does anyone see any reason that this is not it should be?


PS:

I am not sure if this is the correct location for this post. I could not find a location for "Plattform" or "Notifications". If this is not the correct location, please move it to where it may be more useful.

PPS:
Please disregard the lines "----- edits between these lines are not recorded -----". They are used to chop away previous content when an email reply is processed to avoid duplicate content in the tickets. I.e. the reply is split on that token and only the first and last element of the resulting array is joined with "----- previous message removed -----"

PPPS: Why is not colspan and rowspan in tables allowed when sending in this form?