Feature changed by: Stefan Behlert (sbehlert) Feature #305489, revision 14 Title: default email in email applications openSUSE-11.2: Evaluation Priority Requester: Desirable Requested by: Martin Lasarsch (mlasars) Description: To get more subscriptions to the mailinglists it would be nice to have a "default mail" in the mail clients (evolution, kmail) which points the user to the mailinglists. Every openSUSE user should be subscribed to opensuse-announce at least. A simple reply to this "default mail" should subscribe to the list (so it's opt-in, no one should be forced). Of course there could be more information in it, like other important lists, pointing to the main list page. evolution have already a "default mail", with general information about evolution, kmail afaik not. - This might be also usefull for OEM customers to have a welcome mail for + This might be also useful for OEM customers to have a welcome mail for the customers, pointing to the support pages etc.. So general email "branding" packages which makes it possible to have such special "default mails" for the email clients would be usefull. Discussion: #1: Carlos Lange (cflange) (2009-01-17 19:59:30) There are several parts to this suggestion. 1) "default mail": If you mean "Default" in the sense that when I start a new message the To: field is filled out by default with the mailing- list address, I disagree with your comment. The user should set that and an inexperienced user should find herself/himself subscribing to a mailing-list by mistake, just because they forgot to reset the To: field. Such a user would be rightly upset and feel like they were trapped into doing it. 2) If you mean, however, that the address book in Evolution and Kmail should be pre-populated with relevant addresses, such as the mailing- list and others, in the same way the Firefox bookmarks toolbar comes pre-populated with the SUSE folder, then I would agree that this is a useful suggestion, because the user can freely choose to use those addresses or not. 3) I strongly disagree that every openSUSE user should be subscribed to the opensuse-announce mailing-list. I deal with many different types of users. Only a minority of them would be interested in receiving announcements and they actively subscribe to the mailing-list. The vast majority of them likes the Linux-way of being non-intrusive, without the nags and unsolicited messages from the proprietary world, that tend to be associated with annoying marketing strategies. Please, don't advocate that for openSUSE. The SUSE information box shown at the first login is as much in-your- face direct marketing as one should need to take when using openSUSE. And being beautiful and carefully designed as it is, it contains all information a new user needs to decide how much involved with the operating system they want to be. #2: Joe Brockmeier (jbrockmeier) (2009-01-20 02:05:37) (reply to #1) Perhaps "every" is a bit much, but I feel a lot more people should be subscribed than are currently. I find it's not uncommon to talk to people and see that they're unaware of something happening in the community that has been announced on the mailing list. The percentage of people subscribed to -announce is much less than 1% of openSUSE users, and I feel we could be reaching a lot more people. It's not an "annoying marketing strategy," it's an attempt to keep our community informed. Most of the messages that go to announce are not "marketing" in nature, they're informative. #3: Kevin Dupuy (kdupuy9) (2009-01-20 02:49:32) (reply to #2) I also like the idea of having more users subscribed to the -announce list. Every time there is scheduled downtime, even though it is announced on -announce and openSUSE News, some people come on the opensuse@o.o mailinglist "eh, what happened? the servers are down, suse is unreliable!",. so those type of mails I'd like for more users to get. Then again perhaps not every user wants to know when the next project meeting is, so that's a strike against the idea as well. I do think, as with Carlos, that the address book in Kontact and Evolution should have some important email address in there (opensuse@o.o, anything else?) #4: Martin Lasarsch (mlasars) (2009-01-20 17:12:09) (reply to #1) 1. no 2. maybe, why not 3. should means as an opt-in ... not forcing With default i meant to have a simple email in the inbox to make it easier to subscribe to the announce list. + #5: Stefan Behlert (sbehlert) (2009-03-26 10:58:17) + I think the idea of having some addresses in the addressbook is good. + I'm not sure which one's are the ideal ones for that, though. Let'S + start with a few and add what is found missing later. -- openSUSE Feature: https://features.opensuse.org/305489