What I was driving at was the method used by one of the services (CIS, GEnie, AppleLink, E-World... ?) we had some years ago that forced you to deal with your mail, before it allowed you to log off. We think such an alert would solve the problem of folks not remembering to look in their Mailbox, in the first place.
Daniel is correct in that such an alert would probably piss-off some users, but that could be resolved if the User Manager had the ability to control that alert, so it could be turned off once the user had adopted better mail handling practices.
We can deal with old mail, using methods you have suggested, but the larger issue for us is to get them to look at their mail. It's why we have have such very different mailbox icons, to help draw their attention to them. That's helped some, but it's not a totally effective solution.
I'd also add that we've had some problems with attachments, in that the some users don't see the attachment and don't look in the attachment folder. We address these incidents on a case-by-case bases, just like you do in supporting/educating your users. However, I think such problems point to some interface quirks that could be addressed, certainly when they are experienced by a number of novice users, over a fairly long period of time.
Please remember that the majority of our users are not "telecommunicators" and less than 10% have access to other online services or an ISP account. Perhaps this is our whole problem? ;-) The ASTEC BBS has been online for nearly 10 years, but as users come and go the incidents level with the Mailbox problem has been pretty much the same.
Because much of our users mail is from their customers, we are very reluctant to involve any process that disposes of it, until some lengthy period has elapsed.
One of our users suggested another idea, which we like... have the Mailbox window open immediately after connection to the BBS, if there is mail, not just new mail since their last call. That certainly would help our users from forgetting to check or deal with their mail. ;-)
Bob, our system is much smaller than yours, with currently 210 users, since we only offer access to our clients, but the percentage of users who seem to forget to check or deal with their Mailbox is much higher. It's a dumb problem and one I wish "TF" had more options to deal with.
Thanks, gentlemen.
-Rod --------------------------------------------------------- ASTEC Company, Inc. Purcellville, Virginia, USA Consulting, Systems Integration and Systems Management Services for Apple Macintosh Business Users, since 1988. 540-338-3547 voice & fax 540-338-6025 support bbs E-Mail to: ASTEC@aol.com (Private E-Mail server: rod@astecbbs.com) ---------------------------------------------------------
