Ever since Cerb4 was a secret wink shared between me and my keyboard I’ve had this nagging feeling that notifications sent in e-mail about new e-mail seemed rather silly.  I originally tried to get away with only providing RSS notifications in the beta versions, but the community was quick (and right) to defend the existence of “e-mail about e-mail”.

The main distinction between notifications and watchers is in how they really fill two completely different needs:

• Watcher functionality, which consists of automatically sending copies of incoming or outgoing mail to separate addresses, is especially useful for managerial oversight, quality control, training, archiving/backups, or synchronization.  In these situations the copied e-mail isn’t primarily prompting someone to visit the helpdesk because there’s new mail.  It’s just more efficient for these activities to deal with a stream of e-mail to another mailbox (especially with something like oversight) than it is to click into every single ticket from a search or report.  In these situations a full copy of each e-mail message is the most useful content to deal with, opposed to a line of text saying “There is a new message!”.
• Notifications, on the other hand, are specifically intended to “ping” a worker to return to the helpdesk because there is new content that needs their attention.  This is the situation where I have usability and ideological problems with “new e-mail about new e-mail”.  RSS, while less familiar to your average user than e-mail, is specifically designed to syndicate events like a news feed.  A huge benefit of RSS is that it’s in a different context than e-mail, and you can also receive updates about non-email events at the same time.  You aren’t mixing up these RSS “pings” with your typical e-mail; nor are they contributing to the e-mail overload that Cerb4 is supposed to be taking off your shoulders in the first place.  While I’ll likely do another write-up with RSS tips, I consider the most important tip to have two different tools for reading blogs by RSS and receiving status updates by RSS.  For blogs I use Google Reader and for status updates I use Vienna (MacOSX) or FeedDemon (Windows).  When you’re working you don’t want a notification ping every few seconds because you’re watching 300 blogs.  You don’t want to learn to ignore the notifications completely (another reason to separate notifications from e-mail).

There is a subset of the community that uses the watcher functionality to circumvent the browser-interface and reply from handheld devices or traditional e-mail clients like Outlook.  That’s fine.  We designed the system so that was possible; the headers are proxied (in other words, your personal e-mail address is rewritten so the client receives your replies from the helpdesk and your direct contact information is protected) — but that’s not the main reason the watcher functionality exists.

A quick digression: a lot of the confusion between both situations comes from the fact we lump our original watcher functionality in with a plugin called “E-mail Notifications”.  The purist in me likes to pretend that e-mail notifications still don’t exist.  We really should rename that specific functionality back to “watchers”.

Food for thought!

-Jeff@WGM