I sent the following to DStahl after the 3rd Anniversary Q&A on RedAlert channel, and wanted to open it up to the community to see if they have some ideas or constructive feedback for how to make the mail system better, improve player's quality-of-life, etc.

The Mail system feels very limited. A few things I've noticed that could be improved:

• I cannot use a search query on my mails (only sort by Date, From, Subject)
• No sent box, only inbox.
• I cannot copy and paste the text of mails I've received (which can be particularly frustrating for long URLs since hyperlinking is not available).
• Attachments are not visible unless at a mail console. This is rather dangerous as it leads some people to delete mails with valuable items.
• Cannot sort by attachments.
• Attachments are limited to 5 slots.
• Address book of friends or fleetmates.
• No noticeable way to send mails to more than one player (tried separating handles by both commas, and semicolons) or to a subsection of the fleet (say, only the officers, or ranks X,Y, and Z).
• It was once possible to at least read our in-game mail on the forums. Perhaps adding this functionality to Gateway could work now that the forums are using the same code across all PWE games?

The Exchange has gotten some attention lately and I'm hoping that some time can be made to improve the Mail system since a lot of players use it daily.

Seconded that attachments should at least be indicated even when you're not at a console (maybe with a "go to a mail console to retrieve" message). I've deleted more than one "Item returned" message, then realized I just lost the item. (Fortunately, nothing valuable. Yet.)

How about letting us delete more than one email at a time? (Or do I just not know how to do that?)

I would appreciate the function to select and delete more than one mail at a time.

indeed, the mail system is nearly a complete fail. the only good thing about it is that it works, but it's like the person who designed it had never used a private messaging system at all in their life. searching, sorting by attachments, and a sent box are desperately needed. address book, folders, and multiple recipients would be nice, as well as copy and paste.

Indeed, not sure why they took out this function in seeing there was something in the mail, but you had to go to a mailbox to get it.


Also I like to see:

1) The Mail Pop-up message "You have to be at a mailbox" to go away and have it replaced with Red Text at the bottom of mail that has attachments.

2) An Attachment Icon being added?

3) Be able to see the Information window when hovering over attached items. (Which is handy for DOFFs).

4) An Unsend Function. If you mistyped a person's account, that mail is gone. So be nice you could bring it back, especially if it has an attachment.

5) An Error message if an account in STO does not exist.

The mail feature is just about the worst thing in the game. it literally is just the ability to send and that's it.

even if we got a couple of the above suggestions it would be a major step forward.

Definitely some great ideas so far. I particularly like the idea of being able to delete multiple emails at once.

I would think that maybe the exchange should have its own tab, its not always nice to have a spam of dozens of mails from the exchange hiding important ones.

EDIT: Never mind, I misread the post.

I tried setting the exchange mail as spam, but I still keep getting the messages. Oh well.

It's frustrating to when you sell a large number of things like data samples.

There was no attachment icon, you saw what was attached. What I mean by attachment Icon is icons you see from the subject line indicating there is an attachment with that PM.

No, it does not. I've sent mail that shouldn't existed, and never got a warning. Nor have I ever gotten mail with attachments returned as Cryptic claims it would.

That's how it's been since beta.

CSR's typical response is "sorry, go redo the mission". Which was even funner before they actually had mission replays.

Easy to say.