Michel,

I just tried the e-mail and now it works nicely. Another thing that I wish I would have heard about when it was improved!

Now, on to the topic...
My users do not care about the "infrastructure", they just want me to do something that they want, now matter how I have to do it.

In the case of the "useless" icon, it IS useless the way it works at this moment. Mine shows 25 and it used to show 47 until you got rid of the "task list". That tells me nothing of value because I have to see that same number all the time and have to notice if it ever changes!

HOWEVER, if it operated like the others - I do not care about infrastructure - then it would be USEFUL. I would get notified about some comment WHEN and WHERE it matters - when I go into UT. And *I* could keep it 'clean' to MY TASTE, just as I do now with Replies and Privates and Agent. I sure can see how this might "confuse" new UT users, but that is a problem with the implementation and not with the feature itself.

Infrastructure is what it is and, as a USER, I DO NOT CARE. As a USER I want useful features, no matter what it takes to deliver them.
If it cannot be done, then so be it. I am only 1 user out of 15,000+.
But let's not pretend that an e-mail is as good or better. IT IS NOT!

Users are tough critics. But it is users who pay all of our salaries. I know that you value your users. Sometimes they make life difficult, but that's the life we have all chosen. Better we should try hard to go WITH OUR USERS than to go against them just because something might be hard or seem useless.

Jim


>>Why can't you make it work LIKE the "Replies" or "Private" features even though it is 'outside' the messages area???
>>I get some value periodically by using that list to get to a submission of mine fast (no click on dropdown, no click on wish/bug list link, no search arguments, etc).
>>So it would be acceptable to me to have a "move to read" and "list read messages", having the icon/number show whatever number I leave in the list until I clean it up.
>
>The infrastructure of what's outside of the messages area and what's inside is totally different. That can't be done similar to what we have here. We would prefer to switch that to email mode where the user could use Outlook for example for storage and such. The messages area has been enhanced a lot to make it simpler and to avoid confusion. This little icon about notifications is one of our last options to adjust and I think the email would be fine. As Mark mentioned, configuration to receive or not notifications by email would also be at the user's discretion.
>
>>The single message that I ever tried to 'e-mail to a friend" from UT was a big messsssss, so I'm not really thinking that an e-mail is going to be helpful.
>
>Could you clarify on this? Many members are using that option on a regular basis and that works fine. Or, maybe you have turned your mailer to not receive HTML message, which in this case, would make it useless.
>
>>IN OTHER WORDS... I think that the icon/feature *could* be made useful and I'd rather see effort towards doing that than getting rid of it. I don't see how it would confuse novices to UT if it worked LIKE the other icons in that part.
>
>It's not about elimination of the option but using it differently.