Retention issues have been brought-up in the past. Although BOINC has the ability for projects to send email newsletters, the feature doesn't seem to be used much. Since there are already options to control notification in the BOINC website community preferences, please consider enhancing the notification system to automatically "PUSH" project status updates by default.

It could be as simple as emailing the latest "news" post by project staff, or a more complex summary of latest stats and popular message board posts... but automatically generated so project staff doesn't have to take the time.

The projects already have the ability to publish news posts as notices that get downloaded to the client. This is a project opt-in. As for pushing other information by default is a bit more difficult. How do you classify popular message board posts? And even if you find a policy it would still be a project decision (opt-in) to send emails to thousands of volunteers. On problem is that your mail server needs to know about this or it will supress the messages because of a SPAM attempt. Also sending out a lot of mails can quickly mark your mail server as a SPAM distributor and you are listed on a blocklist which no project wants. So project staff has to do something in the end.

CPDN once sent out a mass email message and was promptly block/blacklisted by several email providers. As a result of that the project has never tried again.

There's also the matter of privacy. Some people think you should only receive emails of this type if you've signed up for them.

Some people think, including me, that is the proper course... only send mails if the informational box is ticked in the user profile.

Since we're on that matter, but what I brought up before was that some projects have advanced in using notices as the very spam area I did not like in my mail box either, to the point that I've detached one particular project where I did occasional crunching, to not be advised of their somanieth challenge. Were they looking for retention... maybe an overshot. Notices was meant to be for important stuff and warn users that e.g. some bug needs to be dealt with. Let them set up a twitter and facebook channel if you wish to follow whilst not being a forum frequenter so I would suggest.

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