Email Digest Improvements and Discussion (Zurich+)

Chris D · 2 hours ago

If you manage notifications in your instance - and especially if you're looking to cut down on emails (to improve UX/decrease clutter) - the new Default Digest and Multi-Record Digest functionality added in Zurich is a major game-changer. Digests went from nice-to-have, but functionally low value to huge email savers - I highly recommend you consider using them if this "excessive emails" is a common gripe of your users.

Since I've got some experience now using them, I see some room for continual improvement of digests and so I'm sharing some ideas of mine (please upvote them!) and just starting a discussion to hear anybody else's thoughts on email digests, especially post-Zurich.

Here's brief summaries of these - full details in the ideas themselves:

Notification Dashboard enhancements: More granular Email/SMS notification usage metrics (i.e. emails per user)
- Tracking a simple "emails per user" metric now is entirely screwed up with widespread usage of digests because any one given group email with multiple recipients that turns into a digest becomes multiple emails with one recipient each, resulting in more sys_email records, even though it's the same or fewer total emails. We shouldn't need custom logic to parse sys_email recipients to determine how many individual emails are actually being sent/received by users.
- Note: we're implementing a new table and daily job as a custom workaround - let me know if you want any more details to replicate - it's not a particularly complex solution.
Email Digests with a single part should be sent with the normal email config (i.e. subject and body)
- When you receive a digest with a single part in it - which arguably can be the majority of some digests - it's functionally a normal non-digest email that's just presented as a digest. In these cases, we should be able to have the system just use the non-digest email configuration (i.e. subject/body) so users can get the best of both worlds.
Enabling Mail Scripts in Email Digest Template/Layout
- This is actually a known issue with no planned fix from 2023 - back when digests were kinda useless - but worth fixing now since digests are actually very valuable