A couple of Google Groups tips: getting email notifications, and finding your messages/threads

If you use Google Groups, which I've talked about before, you may encounter a couple of challenges that I did today regarding getting notifications of posts to threads you're participating in, as well as finding messages you've written. I decided to write up my observations in case they may help others.

How can I get notified when someone replies to a message I post (or any thread I'm interested in)?

As in many forums, you can either keep an eye on topics of interest by visiting the web-based interface and watching for your threads of interest, or you may prefer to get an email notification instead. (This is more important for groups that are NOT setup like a mailing list, where you you choose to only see them on the web, or perhaps cannot set them up to send email notification of each new message, as I explain below.)

You can control receipt of email notification for either all messages to the group or by individual thread.

As for all messages to the group, you'll have the choice either when you join a group, or by using "edit my membership", to control the option, "how do you want to read this group?". The choices will be at least "no mail" or "abridged email" where you'll get a summary of messages to the group each day. Depending on how the group was configured by the owner, you may also see "digest email" or "email" (to get each individual message). See the google help for more on those.

Some groups will not offer those second two options (for instance, this was my experience in the Google Desktop group, which is what drove me to look into this). In that case, you can choose to receive email notification of new messages on a given thread. You can do this for threads you create or any thread you read, and you could or use it as an alternative to the options above if you want to receive notification only about some threads.

At the top of the thread of interest, to the right of the thread title (what you or the author named the thread), click "more options". Then choose "email updates to me". You will now receive an email for any postings to that thread. A small mail icon will appear, next to the "rating star" for the thread, the next time you view the thread.

This will also cause the thread to show up in your "favorites" list (links at the top right of the google groups page).

Note that google has no feature to have you be sent notification for all new threads and messages in a group, other than the options discussed above regarding the "edit my membership" option.

How to list "all messages I've written"? 3 ways

Sometimes you want to be able to quickly eyeball the status of threads you've created. There are 3 ways to do that in Google Groups.

The easiest is to click the "profile" link at the top right of the page while logged into google groups. That will open a page showing all your messages, across all groups (most recent first), and it also offers a drop-down to limit which group to view. Note that it also shows a grid of months and years and your number of posts across all groups (or the group you've selected). You can also use this while viewing the message from some other group member, to see what THEY have written about, which can be interesting.

As an alternative, note that you could also do a search using the keyword, author:youremail (as explained at the Google help). This will find all messages by you (or whoever you name). Note the available option to search "this group" (the current group for the message you were viewing) or "all groups". I'll note that if you don't provide a complete email address, it will instead search for messages from someone with that username (when I search for carehart, I don't find those from carehart@gmail.com but only those where I'm identified in the email only as carehart)/

Finally, you can also find any message from you (or someone else) by locating a message and choosing "more options" at the top right of the message (just next to the message's date/time). That will open several options, including "reply", "reply to author", "forward", etc. The last one is "find messages by this author", and it finds all the messages for that author, across all groups.

Note that the URL for that result is one you could then bookmark (and even use in another browser, as it's not tied to a session or anything). Note as well that if you use it to view your own messages, when you're not logged in, it will only search groups that are public, not any you belong to that are private. (Naturally, it will also not let you find messages from another person who posted to private groups you're not a member of.)

Actually, there's one other approach you might make to keep track of desired threads: the "favorites" feature. You can use the "watch this topic" (the star at the top right of the thread) to mark any thread, which will make it show up in the "favorites" link mentioned above. This might be useful if for some reason you didn't want to mark it receive "email updates" as discussed above.

Note that combining the two tips above, you could obtain a list of all messages you've ever written and then choose to look at each to mark it for "email updates to me".

Finding the "last activity" for "your threads"

Sometimes after writing a note to a list, where it doesn't send you email notifications (or you've not set it up), it can be helpful to be able to list your threads to find out if anyone has responded since you last wrote, to know if you have "unread replies".

Sadly, the search result page shown with either approach above doesn't show you who was the last person to respond to the thread. And even the list of your past messages shown using the "profile" option above doesn't show it, though it does show a "number of days ago" (if recent, or a date if older) which is just the date that the message was written, not the last date of activity in the thread.

If your thread is shown on the list of threads in the "discussions" list, that does show who last responded to the thread and when.

The better solution, again, is to mark the thread as a favorite. That then also shows the same info as shown on the aforementioned discussions list.

Conclusion

I just wish that there was a mechanism whereby you could say that any thread you create (and optionally any thread you contribute to) are automatically marked for a) "email me updates" and b) "favorites". Better than that, if it would offer an interface instead for "your threads", that would be better. (You may not want to mark a thread as a favorite, if there was another way to keep an eye on it, saving favorites for threads that really are your favorite.)

tags: google groups  

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