New! Power move: Have Sandy remember an entire email message

I'm thrilled this feature is on the short list, but it doesn't seem to be working for me. I've tried posting from the 'Write Sandy..' link on the website as well as sending email from my registered gmail account. The exact text in the body of the email I sent was:

remember @test

Here's another email with some text.

This email even has a second paragraph.

Lets see if I can search for unique words.

There was no subject line and Sandy was the only recipient. She replied to both of my attempts (gmail and 'Write Sandy' feature) with the "I couldn't find anything you asked me to do..." email.

Similar problems here, though I have had less trouble getting her to recognize them as something she can parse to some degree.

I ran some little tests on my own and saw that she seems to have trouble creating a title without a subject line, or even just handling forwarded messages without subject lines. In case detailing my experience will be helpful in getting this feature working more smoothly, I've done so here.

I took Forge42's example and added a subject line, and that helped:

From: Lista
To: Sandy
Subject: I'm testing your email functionality

remember @test

Here's another email with some text.

This email even has a second paragraph.

Lets see if I can search for unique words.

----

[She recognized this as a note (it appeared on her Website as such) but was not able to give it a proper title:]

Greetings, Lista!

I've taken note of:

#1 Remember
- tagged with @test

Yours truly,

Sandy
----
Without a good title, it wouldn't be too searchable...in fact, even though she categorized it as a note, when I tried to search on "unique" or "second paragraph", she was unable to return any results.

So instead, I started over and tried asking her to remind me about it, again making sure to include content in the subject line:

From: Lista
To: Sandy

Subject: Remind me in 3 minutes

Here's another email with some text.

This email even has a second paragraph.

Lets see if I can search for unique words.

----

Hey, Lista!

I scheduled:

#1 Wed, 12/26/2007 8:37pm [No name]
- email reminder at 8:37pm

Yours truly,

Sandy
----

Yep, she actually called it "[no name]". In fact, that created another little glitch: on her Website, you click on an item's title to view or edit it...so in this case, the item actually became unclickable. I could only work with it by telling her to update or forget it through email.

Also, this time, she did not list it as a note. And again, it could not be found by searching on "unique" or "second paragraph".

The bright spot: she did indeed retain the contents of these emails, with the original headers (including my original subject line), and returned all of it intact to me in her confirmations (for the one she called "Remember" I could also see the original email as context for the item online). Also, when she sent me the reminder for the second one shown, the contents of the reminded email were again included just as Rael described, at the end of her message.

I forwarded her an actual personal email as another test message, and she did better with that one:

From: Lista
To: Sandy
Subject: Fwd: Dinner confirmed for the 29th; details to follow

Remind me Dec 28

[the text of the original message was very simple; no hyperlinks, no graphics, no fancy signature, just a paragraph and a typed sig line]
----
From: Sandy:
To: Lista

Aloha, Lista!

I added this to the calendar:

#1 Fri, 12/28/2007 Fwd: Dinner confirmed for Dec 29th; details to follow
- email reminder at 6:00am

All the best,

Sandy

----

Nice---she didn't get confused by the date in the subject line, and she was able to use it as the item title! But this still did not show up as a note on her Website either, and it was not searchable beyond the subject line. However, she successfully returned the full text of the email again in her confirm.

So it does look like including a subject line, one that isn't a command, really helps her out. I'd still love to see her be able to consistently recognize these as notes, though, so they could be searchable---not seeing that functionality as quite ready for prime time yet. Or maybe I just don't understand how to use it correctly!

Just as a heads up I tried this with twitter and no joy. I sent:

d s Remember @note @procedure_or_doing_something

Blah Blah Blah Blah
1. Do this
2. Do that
3. Then this
4. Then that

and the reminder that was stored was:

"Blah Blah Blah Blah 1. Do this 2. Do that 3. Then this 4. Then that @note @procedure_or_doing_something"

Great work on getting the notes working...just thought I would test it with twitter.

Like wise. I have tried the same thing... and got the same result form Sandy. Perhaps she is not done with here holiday break yet....?

Maybe I'm missing something, but isn't that what it is supposed to do?

Hi Forge42,

In addition to the workaround that Lista found, I've helped Sandy to be less confused about remembering an email when you use a tag with the "remember". That change will likely go live in a few hours, which means that your example should work the way you expect by the time you email Sandy again tomorrow.

Thanks for the report!

Best,

David

Hi Lista,

Thanks for the detailed experimentation, it's a huge help. I've just finished working with Sandy to make the following changes:

* When you send a message with "remember @tag", she no longer gets confused, but properly remembers the message as a note, taking the name from either the subject or the first line of the following paragraph.

* When you have a subject such as "Remind me in 3 minutes", if the message is not in reply to a reminder (in which case it snoozes the reminder), Sandy tries to construct a title from the first paragraph of the email. This should prevent the dreaded "[no name]". The detail still won't be stored as a note, though. Because you've asked for a reminder, Sandy assumes that it's an event. At least for now.

* I wasn't able to replicate the inability to click on the name of the detail the UI, though; when I had an unnamed event, I was still able to click on the words "[no name]". Have I missed something?

Thanks again for the very helpful post!

Hey Theory:

Thanks for addressing this. As of 8:15am Eastern Time, I'm still not having any luck. I sent the following text:

>remember @test
>
>I certainly hope this feature works.
>
>I really hope that I can search for unique words that don't appear in the items title.
>
>Peanuts.

And got back an "I don't see anything to do message." Has the change gone live yet?

Yesh, sorry Forge42, we didn't get the deploy done until about an hour ago. Please do give it another try now. Sorry for the delay.

Best,

David

Yes, Non-Sequitur is right. Sandy doesn't understand numbered lists, just bulleted lists using *s.

Best,

David

Thanks Theory. It seems to be working now.

However, not all is as I expected. From Rael's original post, I expected the entire text of the message to be "searchable". That's doesn't seem to be the case (at least not immediately after an item is added). Words that appear in the items title are immediately searchable, but text beneath that level is not. Does it take some time for the search feature to log the entire text of the item? Or is this not intended to be a feature currently?

Hi, Theory,

You're quite welcome; it's good to hear that it really was helpful (instead of, say, was like beating a dead horse). That was certainly my intent...er, I mean the former, not the latter!:-) Sandy's pretty fascinating, so I'm just sorry I don't have time to do more frequent self-guided tours of her quirks and capabilities.

Sounds like I'm just in time to check out the rollout of the fixes you mention here. Oh, first, I tried to duplicate creating an unclickable reminder but was not able to manage it. I think that's a very good thing, though! I'll be pleased never to see that micro-nightmare again...

After that, I tried the following checks by forwarding a copy of a personal email I had sent to a friend of mine (who shall be referred to here as Betty).

First, I tried a variation of Forge42's now-infamous command (regards, Forge42!):

From: Lista
To: Sandy
Subject: Fwd: dinner soon!

Remember @test

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lista
Subject: dinner soon!
To: Betty

Hey, Betty!

OK, I've found three [email continues for a couple more paragraphs, but no graphics or hyperlinks, just text and then a signature]

----
From: Sandy
To: Lista

I've taken note of:

#1 Fwd: dinner soon!
- tagged with @test

[Good, it's a note and she tagged it just fine, and she's kept the subject as I sent it to her. But we already knew she likes getting a subject line that's not a command, so how does it go when there's no subject line or the subject is a command? One at a time...]
----
From: Lista
To: Sandy
[totally blank subject line]

Remember @test

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lista
Subject: dinner soon!
To: Betty

Hey, Betty!

<blah>
----
From: Sandy
To: Lista

I've taken note of:

#1 Forwarded message
- tagged with @test

[And thus she parsed correctly to generate another note, and indeed she found some content to use as the note's title despite my leaving the subject line blank. But in a usability sense, we're still foiled here by her willingness to view the forwarding headers as content. Hm, anyway, what if I ask for a reminder instead?]
----
From: Lista
To: Sandy
Subject: Remind me in 10 min

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Lista
Subject: dinner soon!
To: Betty

Hey, Betty!

<blah>

----
From: Sandy
To: Lista

I scheduled this for you:

#1 Fri, 12/28/2007 9:18pm Forwarded message
- email reminder at 9:18pm

[So yep, setting reminders this way works just as well, except for the darned forwarding headers! So the next time, I manually deleted all of those before sending.]
----
From: Lista
To: Sandy
[blank subject line]

Remember @test

Hey, Betty!

<blah>
----
From: Sandy
To: Lista

I've taken note of:

#1 Hey, Betty!
- tagged with @test

----
Thus, here's my usability assessment. It seems to me that for now, unless we (Sandy's clients) are satisfied with using tags to index and distinguish among emails we've forwarded to her (and personally, I'm not a tag lover), we probably should carefully revise the subject line of any message before forwarding it to her (e.g., "FW: I'm replacing the original subject with my own content so I can differentiate and search among emails I send to Sandy"). Alternatively, before sending, we clients can manually delete all the forwarding headers generated by our email program...as well as any other content in the message that precedes the part we want Sandy to use as the item's title. (And that would include our sender's original greeting, because 18 saved emails in Sandy called "Hi, Lista!" won't be helpful to me if their contents aren't searchable!)

So I'm willing to use those workarounds, but ultimately, I'm with Forge42: full-text searchability within Sandy of forwarded emails would be glorious. For me, being able also to do this for forwards that she considers reminders would be heaven! True, I can also imagine why you haven't implemented it; I assume that that would require her to do far more processing than she does now of each word in each of our entries! So I can only hope there's some way to achieve that without slowing her down. And hey, I'm just a client, so I'll leave that to you.

By the way, if you'd like me to email Sandy's team directly with future personal test results, just let me know. I don't want to clutter up the boards with details that others may find mind-numbing!

Nice testing Lista!

The only comment that I would add is that the only people Values of N can blame for us wanting full text searching is themselves! Stikkit had that ability and it was simply stunning. I certainly hope they get that up and running in Sandy sooner rather than later. I would assume the primary hurdle is processing power and processing time.

Thanks for the props, Forge42.:-)

Funny, I got here exactly the opposite way: I stumbled onto Sandy and then decided, "Gosh, let's go see what else these Values of N folks are doing!" So then I found Stikkit...and, ironically, one of my first thoughts about it was, "well, it's cute in a prototype sort of way...but you can't really talk to it, can you?" Heh. Funny how we're always biased by what we are exposed to first!

I do agree that the full-text searching they have in Stikkit is impressive. But I couldn't help but notice...Stikkit's a little slow. I wouldn't want that to happen to our Sandy! So until the IWS team finds a way to give her that ability without slowing her down as much as it seems to slow down Stikkit, I'll willingly live with Sandy the way she is...and perhaps count my blessings that I don't truly know what I'm missing, in terms of the Stikkit-not-Sandy search capabilities!

You're welcome, Rael. And more goodness from the Sandy team is always a treat.