CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

Been thinking for quite a long time about the lack of differences between CiviMail and the mail feature in the core, and I think that allowing you do to roughly the same thing with to different tools is bad from a usability point of view (The Zen rule n°7: There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it .

My first suggestion was to get rid of one of the feature:  ( http://civicrm.org/node/452 ), and the general consensus was that it wasn't a good suggestion. Nown you can use the result of a search to do a civimailing (great), making it even less differences between civimail and mail (bad).

A few days, one of my client wanted to send a mail. They wanted to do it like in a regular mail client, but keep the history of the mail in civicrm, and was to send an invitation to an event and put in CC the speakers :
- all the "to" (the group invited) see the list of the others so know who else have been invited,
- the speakers are in CC, so everyone know they are there, and that they are FYI only
- and add some other contacts in the BCC (the president of the association in my case)

(Got a mock up ready to push in the svn trunk as for the new mail activity interface, as discussed there http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,6323.0.html ) if you want me to elaborate

So my new suggestion is about modifying the mail activity behaviour, and instead of send "one to one" emails to each contact, it becomes like a real email sending (TO, CC, BCC), and offer the personalised one to one only in civimail.

What do you think ?

With that, you catch 3 birds in one stone:
- you offer a new and expected "send to a group"+put someone in CC behaviour (my users want it, and right now, they copy paste the list of emails and use their normal mail client, so we loose the history of activities and they loose the template stuff)
- That clarify the usage: if you want to do an emailing (one to one, personalisation with {token}...), use civimail, if you want to send a mail, use the "improved" mail action (and you can still BCC: the group instead of TO: it if you want to)
- On the activities tab of the sender, you will have one and only one mail activity

While we are at it: the text+html fields are too complicated and scary for a small email. What about doing like PHPlist: one field, if there are html tags in it, generate a text version (with *bold* and _italic_, basic text only transformation before  the strip_tags) and send both.
If it's a text only version, then sends it as a text.

What do you think ?

X+

Hi

If you want personnalised email with token, go with civimail.

In my example, it wasn't for an request for registration, the mail wasn't personalised, it was just to inform who was invited, and who was going to speak.

Not sure if it was a good example, but sending a mail to a few contacts and putting some more in copy is something I do quite on a regular basis, and given the state of my inbox, I'd say I'm not the only one

To come back to my point: leave the mass mailing feature in civimail and transform the mail activity as a real mail tool, like you'd do with your mail client.

What do you think ?

X+