'New Post' Email Alerts

Would it be possible to:

1) Put name of forum/thread in subject line of the email
2) Put the first 100 characters of new post in the body

#1 would allow for better filtering/sorting of emails as they are received, and #2 would clue the recipient in to what the post is about and perhaps encourage them to respond.


I'm following a lot of forums/threads/discussions, but they all get lumped together in my email account because they have the same subject line. And I've been finding it's far too easy to miss seeing game post notification if there's a lot of other forum activity taking place around the same time. And seeing the actual post (or segment of it) in the body would probably save quite a few website loads.

I'd imagine #1 should be easy enough to do, as you're already putting that information in the body of the email (except if it's a new thread, in which case it's missing). #2 might be a bit more tricky, but I remember char counts weren't too bad in my programming classes.

Yah, I'm not sure why new thread titles are missing sometimes. I get them half the time, half not; haven't been able to crack why yet.

Both parts of this are straight forward enough. The question is: would it be more useful to put the thread or forum title in the post? Doing both could get a bit wordy. I'm tempted to just go with the forum, or if it's a game, the game name.

As for a bit of the post, I can do that, though I have to figure out how I want to format the email.

At some point, I have to figure out how I can turn them into digest emails too, maybe once an hour or 15 minutes after the last post was made? I donno, something.

I think the thread title would be best for the subject line. For example, alerts on this thread might read:

New Post in 'New Post' Email Alerts

Or a game alert might read:

New Post in OOC

I'd imagine that most GMs/Players are going to recognize the name of the thread as coming from one of their games, and you could still put the forum info in the body of the email, allowing the recipient to click through to it.


As far as formatting goes, I don't think you need to change what you have...just add to it. For example, the notice I received on your post could have looked like:
(That was the first 197 characters of your post with an additional ...)

I may end up doing the first 15-20 words. But my concern about showing the thread name in the title is it wont' help as much as expected: a lot of games have a thread called "OOC Thread" for example. A forum name/game name may prove more useful.