Diffs in Your Notification Emails

Notification Improvements

I'd like to point out a few changes to our email notifications that we have deployed over the past week. Probably the most exciting is that commit notifications now include a list of all the changes that were made to the committed files. This is shown as a standard unified diff, and saves you time by enabling you to see the changes without having to click through to Trac.

You may enable this feature by going to the Notifications tab on the Project Settings page and selecting the Diffs option. You can also enable it for an entire Category. Note that all new projects will have diffs enabled by default.

While making these additions to our commit notifications, we also did a visual refresh of all our notification messages. The new look includes larger text, a more consistent feel across notifications, and better support of mobile devices.

Replying to Notifications

In a further step to help you to do more from your email, we have added the ability to reply to ticket and commit notifications. This has been a long-requested feature, and allows you to reply back to the person who made the commit or ticket change that you are being notified of. That way you can further discuss the changes that were made. Additionally, if you select the CC option for ticket notifications (see the Notifications tab of the Project Settings page), then everyone who was notified will be included in the email's CC list. Then you can reply-to-all for a group discussion.

We have also integrated this with our Incoming Email feature. Incoming Email allows you to create an email box that your users can send bug reports to, which will then be automatically converted into Trac tickets. Now you can optionally specify an email box that all notification replies go to, so that you can make further changes to the ticket without leaving your email. This includes adding comments and changing ticket attributes. Further notifications would be sent out in response to your changes, continuing the conversation. This option is available on the Incoming Emails tab of the Project Settings page.

We use the email2trac Trac plugin to provide this functionality. For more details on the format for changing tickets, see this page.

Better Performance

You may have also noticed the pages on our site loading a bit faster over the last week. We have been deploying some performance-related changes and have measured a significant improvement, especially in Trac.

We hope you enjoy the new features! Please let us know what you think about the email and performance improvements by leaving a comment below.