Correction: Wikipedia is the largest part of the projects. Why do people always want to pretend otherwise, or lament that fact?

2011/12/31 Huib Laurens sterkebak@gmail.com

That we need to change in Wikimedia. Wikipedia is just a small part of the projects.

2011/12/31, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com:

...

Why do email notifications from Wikipedia have the sender as "MediaWiki Mail"? Most Wikipedia users probably don't know what "MediaWiki" is. I suggest it be changed to "Wikipedia" or "Wikipedia notifications" or something like that.

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Kind regards,

Huib Laurens WickedWay.nl

Webhosting the wicked way.

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2012/1/2 K. Peachey p858snake@gmail.com:

On Mon, Jan 2, 2012 at 5:13 PM, M. Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:

...

Correction: Wikipedia is the largest part of the projects. Why do people always want to pretend otherwise, or lament that fact?

Never said otherwise, Huib just said Wikipedia was one of many WikiMedia projects.

Now, now, let's not feed the troll, shall we?

On topic: As such a message is a clear candidate for l10n, I suggested that MediaWiki should have a string for that, which defaults to "{{SITENAME}} Mail". What do you guys think?

Strainu

On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 3:32 PM, Mark A. Hershberger < mhershberger@wikimedia.org> wrote:

Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com writes:

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Why do email notifications from Wikipedia have the sender as "MediaWiki Mail"? Most Wikipedia users probably don't know what "MediaWiki" is. I suggest it be changed to "Wikipedia" or "Wikipedia notifications" or something like that.

Please see https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/32770 where Sam Reed says "If we decide what we want [$wgPasswordSenderName] to be, we can configure it."

If you want us to set it, post what you think the "From" addresses should be to the bug. Or file a new bug for setting it.

How about just setting it to the sitename? 'Wikipedia', 'Wikinews', etc. As, uh, suggested already above. :)

-- brion

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 10:16 AM, Thomas Gries mail@tgries.de wrote:

See also

http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/includes/UserMailer.p... and change line 195 $headers['X-Mailer']='MediaWiki mailer'; to something else

I don't see any reason to change that; X-Mailer is a low-level header which says things like "Outlook", and we would expect it to say the low-level software used if it's there at all. Users will never see it unless they go picking at the raw headers of the mail.

-- brion

Am 03.01.2012 19:56, schrieb Brion Vibber:

http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/includes/UserMailer.p... line 195 $headers['X-Mailer']='MediaWiki mailer';

I don't see any reason to change that; X-Mailer is a low-level header which says things like "Outlook", and we would expect it to say the low-level software used if it's there at all. Users will never see it unless they go picking at the raw headers of the mail.

Yes, I am also not in favour of changing anything with the low-level header.

Perhaps the original requester wanted a change of the sender addresses in LocalSettings.php:

$wgEmergencyContact = "sender <e-mail>"; $wgPasswordSender = "sender <e-mail>";

Email notifications are sent with the $wgPasswordSender address an name (see line 622 in http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/phase3/includes/UserMailer.p...

$adminAddress=newMailAddress($wgPasswordSender,$wgPasswordSenderName);

Ideally X-Mailer (by convention) should be something like:

*MediaWiki/{version}*

In fact better would be

*MediaWiki/{version} **PHP/{version} *

But it probably doesn't matter too much :)

Tom

On 3 January 2012 20:32, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:

I wouldn't be so fast in leaving only the sitename as sender name - a mail from "Wikipedia" would raise my (manual) spam alarms, just like emails from the "Federal Bureau of Investigations" or from "[X] Bank".

Why is "Wikipedia" more suspicious than "Wikipedia mail"?

On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 12:32 PM, Strainu strainu10@gmail.com wrote:

I wouldn't be so fast in leaving only the sitename as sender name - a mail from "Wikipedia" would raise my (manual) spam alarms, just like emails from the "Federal Bureau of Investigations" or from "[X] Bank".

Facebook's email messages come from "Facebook". Twitter's email messages come from "Twitter". Google Plus email messages come from "Google+". OpenTable email messages come from "OpenTable". Netflix email messages come from "Netflix". Kickstarter email messages come from "Kickstarter". Quora email messages come from "Quora".

Not every wheel needs to be reinvented. :)

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

---- Original Message -----

From: "Strainu" strainu10@gmail.com To: "Wikimedia developers" wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, January 3, 2012 3:32:09 PM Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Email notification sender 2012/1/3 Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org:

...

On Sat, Dec 31, 2011 at 10:09 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:

...

Why do email notifications from Wikipedia have the sender as "MediaWiki Mail"? Most Wikipedia users probably don't know what "MediaWiki" is. I suggest it be changed to "Wikipedia" or "Wikipedia notifications" or something like that.

I agree with the {{SITENAME}} suggestion, and would prefer to omit "Mail". (The fact that it's an email is self-evident.)

I wouldn't be so fast in leaving only the sitename as sender name - a mail from "Wikipedia" would raise my (manual) spam alarms, just like emails from the "Federal Bureau of Investigations" or from "[X] Bank".

For my part, I believe that "Mediawiki Mail" is proper, as it's mail *generated by the named program* (note: not "site").

If you reverse it to Wikipedia/media, though, it's from the site, not the program, and the expected usage indeed changes not to include "Mail".

Cheers, -- jra