On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 2:15 PM, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:
Linkedin's email messages come from different senders - by far the best solution.
LinkedIn's notifications, honestly, look very messy to me. There are at least three different senders: 1) <Real Name> via LinkedIn, 2) LinkedIn Updates, 3) LinkedIn Today. Category 1) is used for system notifications about people inviting you to connect with them. This seems somewhat misleading. The message pretends that it's personal, but in actual fact it's an automatically generated message.
But, at least the LinkedIn messages that have the "<Real Name> via LinkedIn" format always include an actual quoted message by <Real Name>, even if it's the default "I'd like to add you to my personal network" message.
In our context, it's important to distinguish between user-to-user e-mail mediated by MediaWiki, and system notifications sent by MediaWiki.
User-to-user email uses the sender's email address in the From: line and should continue to do so.
System notifications should be identified through the site name. This will make it more understandable that replying to the message will not be a useful way to action the notification, and it makes it clear that the message does not contain any personal note from a different user.
Adding the qualifier "mail" to a system notification is not in fact helpful. We're self-evidently dealing with an e-mail. The qualifier may in fact be confusing in that it suggests a user-to-user interaction (You've got mail) when in fact it's a system-to-user interaction.
If there is to be a qualifier, it should be something like "updates", but I don't believe a qualifier is necessary for notifications, and most mainstream websites don't appear to use one.
Erik