Tonight we pushed a small change to the way Basecamp email notifications appear in your inbox. The subject line of all email notifications now have a consistent format that starts with the name of the related project. This change applies to emails announcing new Messages, newly uploaded Files, and new Comments about Messages, To-dos or Milestones.
Starting now, notification subjects will always show the name of the project in brackets at the beginning of the subject line, e.g., [Project name] Subject of email
Why did we change this?
Before the change some notifications had the name of the Basecamp account in the email subject while others the project name. This was confusing, inconsistent, and made it difficult for customers who wanted to organize their mail to create effective filtering rules. Plus this change just makes more sense. Relatively few people have lots of Basecamp accounts but almost every account has multiple projects. Knowing which project a new message was posted in is a lot more useful than knowing which account it belongs to.
Will this effect my existing email rules?
If you're filtering your email using the project name you shouldn't have to change a thing. However, mail rules matching the account name will need to be updated. Instead of filtering by the name of the account in the subject line, new rules should match the account email address in the From field.
Because this new format contains both the account and project in the email, you can now filter by both. This is especially useful if you have lots of similarly named projects for a variety of clients.
Here is what an email filter for this message would look like in Apple Mail (other email software should allow similar rules):
This is a small change that we think will make email notifications more clear, more useful, and easier to manage. We hope you like it.
Thanks for being a Basecamp customer!
