Acceptance etc emails are not sent automatically, and sending them by hand is a pain

[RichiH]

On https://pretalx.fosdem.org/orga/event/fosdem-2024/mails/outbox/ I can't filter the list by devroom, and when I click a single email to be sent, I jump back up in the page.

This is bad workflow for the devroom managers -- ideally we should just send email for them when they click accept/reject.

[paulgirard]

But adapting content is an important feature. For instance in our devroom we wanted to add the talk format in the acceptance email cause some talks were asking for lecture but we accepted them as lightning.

So to reduce the pain without making everything auto I would suggest :

• ideally divide the outbox by devroom
• at least add filters in the outbox: by devroom, by email template, by session type (see next)...
• allow manager to specify different session type in pretalx as this variable can be used in template or to generate emails from different template. We would have needed that to distinguish normal/lightning talk. Even dummies session types like A, B, C if those need to be generic to all devrooms would make it useful.
• add bulk action applying only to emails filtered by the missing filter system
• don't create any email in the outbox automatically when accepting/refusing but let managers generate them in bulk through template they chose. But that only work if it's also possible to send them in bulk by devroom.

Here my two cents after experiencing the pain. Still the pain was not fro nothing as official emails is a very nice feature.

[johanvdw]

Without having to store extra information for the mail (eg track). I think it would already be useful to have checkboxes next to messages so you can pick more easily which mails to send "select all/remove some/send selected".

Sending mail automatically after some time is even less work to implement and would also make the outbox cleaner which solves most of the problems also (it actually went quite well up to now). But how long should you wait. Eg the community devroom made the selection but edited/sent out mail only the next day.

[RichiH]

Fair, for devrooms which want/need to customize we should offer this ability; maybe even with a custom template.

For the M&O devroom, we were under the impression mails would be sent automatically. Having actions for "accept stage email" and "accept and send email" in the UI would make it clearer.