An email so you never miss a message

Messaging is starting to come alive. Conversations are springing up around marketplace listings, and soon between all members of the community. The catch: if you're not logged in when someone writes to you, the message can go unnoticed for days. That's over now.

What changes

From now on, when a member sends you a message and you haven't read it on the site, you receive a summary email with:

• The name of the member who wrote to you
• A preview of the message
• The puzzle in question if the conversation is about a listing
• A button to open the conversation directly

If several people write to you within the same window, the email groups them neatly rather than flooding your inbox.

A cadence designed not to bother you

We thought hard about how to avoid the classic trap: too many emails. Here's the promise the system keeps:

• No email if you're online. If you read the message via messaging as it arrives, we send you nothing. No duplicate of what you're already seeing live.
• No flood when a conversation heats up. Even with ten messages exchanged in a few minutes, you get at most one email per half hour, grouping the lot.
• A deliberate short delay before sending, to give your live reading a chance to take precedence over the email. The vast majority of messages you read right away never trigger a notification.

The result: you're notified only when you truly need to be.

A single page for all your emails

We took the opportunity to rethink the settings page. Everything about the emails you receive is now centralized in Settings, Notifications tab.

You'll find two distinct sections there:

• Communications. Emails from the community: welcome, tips, contests, good deals, new features. Check this box if you want to stay in the loop on Puzzlovers news.
• Notifications. Emails tied to your personal activity, such as a new message arriving. On by default, and clearly marked as recommended (best not to uncheck it, so you don't miss what we send you).

Every setting takes effect immediately. No "Save" button to hunt for, no page reload.

And next?

This first building block comes at just the right moment: very soon, messaging will open up beyond the marketplace to let all members contact one another and chat freely. Discussing a shared puzzle, asking for advice, arranging a swap, sharing a find: everything that makes a real community come alive will be able to happen in private messages. And thanks to email notifications, you'll no longer miss any of those conversations, even when you're not on the site.

In the updates that follow, the same system will power other community events (likes, comments, badges, and so on), always with the same care given to cadence and control.

The goal stays the same: your inbox should never be a burden, and you should stay in charge of what you receive. If you have feedback on these new emails, don't hesitate to share it with us via the chat.