Partner settings should default to opt-out for email messages

Hello Stefan, could you explain in more details the kind of unexpected behaviors you noticed in OpenERP 7.0 with regard to emails, in light of the latest comments on bug 1099181 and 1130207 (which are actually duplicates of bug 1095594)?

In a nutshell, OpenERP 7.0 only sends emails for explicit messages sent by users, and does what they expect: send the emails. Partners/Users who really prefer to receive these notification exclusively in their OpenERP Messaging Inbox can switch "notification_email_send" to "Never". Finally, there's an optional "opt_out" flag that can be used for specific purposes related to mass-mailings, but the system does not send any automatically, so you decide how you want to use it.

More specifically:
- OpenERP 7.0 does not send automatic emails unless an explicit message was written by a user (other notifications like state changes are turned off by default)
- Setting the "notification_email_send" to "Incoming Emails and Discussions" is absolutely required otherwise all messages would be silently discarded by default: messages written by users would never be received by their intended recipients nor would replies coming via the mail gateway
- Setting 'opt_out' to True by default would not make any difference: first because opt_out is intended for mass-emails only, and secondly because there is no logic hardwired to this field anywhere
- The semantics of `opt_out` are now meant to be company-defined, as the system does not send any mass-mail by default. Some companies are using `marketing_campaign` and they can choose to check the `opt_out` flag in the conditions for entering or staying in their campaigns. Other companies only keep real customers in their CRM and don't have newsletters, but may need to send exceptional mass-mail to their customers (e.g. security alerts or anything). They can filter the recipients based on the `opt_out` flag before using the mass-mail composer (using the pre-configured "Available for mass-mailing" filters), but they decide what `opt_out` means for their business. There may be legitimate business reasons that may require to contact customers even if they have opted-out of *something*, and silently discarding the mails would not leave any choice. The mass-mailing system can be used for other things than unsolicited commercial emails - it's a generic mechanism.

If the system sends automatic emails in other circumstances than the above, it's probably a bug indeed.

Thanks in advance for your explanations

Hi Olivier,

let's just say that we do not trust OpenERP with our mail server since the EDI debacle in 6.1. The moment we found out that our first test installation was sending out unsollicited emails to real contacts was very embarresing for us. A lot of other people experienced the same thing. It even became a 'best practice' among some partners to disable the mailserver on OpenERP demo and development environments. See lp:934242. Its status has always been 'opinion'. I am glad that OpenERP SA now seems to have the same opinion, as your response to this issue indicates.

The bug that you referenced, in which an unsollicited email was still send by accident shows that you do not have to be paranoid to call for a very conservative mail policy. For instance, an internal note sent to the customer by accident can do a lot of damage. Add to that the confusing usage of terminology (for both users and your and our developers): comments, notifications, emails, messages, and the madness of the opt-out field that was not honoured anywhere in the system up until not long ago. I simply do not know what to expect when I fill in a note anywhere in OpenERP.

I know https://code.launchpad.net/~openerp-dev/openobject-addons/7.0-crm-feedback-tde addresses some of these points. But I feel that a strong opt-out foundation can help OpenERP regain the trust in these issues, as you then start out in a locked down situation and see what happens when you move to a more relaxed configuration.

As for opt-out for mass mailings, I am very happy to see the "Available for mass mailings" filters introduced in the aforementioned branch. As I indicated in the original bug description, in the Netherlands a party needs to explicitely agree to receiving such emails. This policy cannot properly be administered when the setting defaults to opt-in. It may be considered a localization issue.

So thank you for your response and for taking up a healthier attitude towards silently sent mail since 6.1. I think ours is still a valid opinion on this issue and maybe you should therefore change the status of this issue to 'opinion'.

Hello Stefan,

Thanks for the nice and detailed explanation, it's quite similar with the lp:934242.
But as Oliver said that by default "Opt-out" is false is designed decision and well explained on comment#4 on lp:934242.
Still we get the "Opinion" form the community. So lets set it as a "Opinion".

Thanks and more suggestions are welcomed!

Hi all,

I've just encountered some behaviours I found unexpected (broken?), and I traced them back to this fix.

(#1) On a document's Openchatter, write a message using the "full mail composer" dialog; there you are able to add new email addresses/Partners on the fly. I found that these new Partners were not receiving the message as expected; the server log and the mail.message table showed no problems with it.
I eventually found that the mail was not being sent because the Partner's default for "notification_email_send" is "none".
The solution was to set the default back to "comment".

(#2) Create an email template, where the destination is "partner_id.email", and use the button to add it to the context menu. Now go to the corresponding model's tree view, check one line, use the "More..." -> Send email... option, and send the email. The Partner (or partners) will not receive the mail as expected.
This is because the send mail context menu action will exclude Partners with the opt-out flag, which in turn is turned on by default.

I believe that change #1 should be reverted, since if breaks the messaging system, as in the example above.
If a Partner/Customer happens to be in the followers, probably that's intentional and messages should be sent out.
If you really want to silence mails to Partner by default, it would be best to create an usability module for this, so that people make a conscious choice by installing it.

As for #2 , it can be argued that I just need to setup properly the Partner I want to be able to send "mass" emails.
After all, legally I might have to ask customers to allow for mailings, and not assume it by default .
The issue is that Partners are not only Customers: they are employees, suppliers, etc.
In my case, there were subcontractors and from a user PoV the default behaviour was unexpected (even if it could be agued to be correct).
So, I would also find best for this choice to be implemented in a specific usability module.

Comments?

PS: as you can imagine, this analysis took a few days of debugging and head scratching...

Hello Daniel,

Regarding item (#1), we hit the same problem last week: when creating an e-mail in OpenERP and typing a new e-mail address, a new partner is created with notification_email_send = 'none', and the mail is never sent. This is unexepected for the user.

Regarding item (#2), I'm not sure the problem you see is related to the opt_out field, since it is unused in default addons (there is even a comment in res_partner/email_template which says "This field is unused by default"). Do you know which module could be using it?

Nevertheless, I agree with you that this change should be reverted in OCB and moved to a usability module. There could be alternatives implementations, such as not adding customers to the followers by default.

-sbi

Confirmed. The OCB default setting of email_notification_send does not work for very common email scenario's. As my earlier posting in this thread indicates, I'm very emotional about the way that EDI mails were sent out in OpenERP 6.1 but I think the OBC default defeats the purpose of trying to get a sane email flow in 7.0. For what it's worth, it does seem to me that OpenERP 7.0 refrains from sending out automatic emails, and the distinction between messages and notes on the chatter gives the appropriate control over whether something is mailed out.

So I'm sorry Daniel if this kneejerk initiative by me and Camp2camp in OCB caused you and other people any pain. It did help me sleep at night but I guess that was not worth it.

As for opt_out, the code that mentions this field does not seem to support your conclusions but with the whole debate on deviations in OCB it does look to me like a good candidate to have in a community module.

I opened up an OCB-specific bug report for further discussion: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ocb-addons/+bug/1249600

Should the status for OCB be changed? To "Invalid"?

I'm expecting some more input but maybe we should make some more noise.

https://github.com/odoo/odoo/issues/392