Replying to a snag by email

When someone assigns you a snag, Rectify sends you an email about it, and another whenever someone else adds to that snag. You can reply to any of these emails, and your reply is added to the snag as a comment, without opening the app. You don’t even need a Rectify account yet. Photos you attach to the reply are added to the comment too.

Which emails you get

There are two kinds, both sent to you in any organisation you belong to, whether you’re an owner, a member or an assignee.

When you’re assigned a snag. You get one whenever someone else assigns a snag to you. Assigning a snag to yourself doesn’t send anything.

When someone else updates a snag you’re assigned to. You get one when someone else:

• adds a note or photos,
• changes its status, including closing it, or
• decides on a due date extension you asked for.

Several changes saved together, such as a note with a status change, arrive as one email. If you’ve already opened the snag in the app and seen the change before the email goes, it isn’t sent.

If you’ve been invited but haven’t set up your account yet, you still get these emails and can still reply to them. You’ll get a separate email to set up your account, but you don’t need to do that before replying.

Turning them off

Each kind has its own switch in the app. Go to Settings, tap your name at the top, then tap Notifications, and switch off Snag Assignments, Updates on My Snags, or both. They apply to every organisation you belong to.

How to reply

1. Open the email and reply to it as normal.
2. Write your comment above the line that reads “Reply above this line to add a comment”.
3. Send it from the same email address the snag email was sent to.

Your reply usually appears on the snag within a minute or so, as a comment posted in your name. Everyone who can see the snag sees it in the app, alongside every other comment.

A reply adds a comment and nothing else. To change a snag’s status, for example to mark it resolved, use the app.

What comes through

What you typed. Rectify tries to remove the rest before posting:

• The quoted email. Everything below the reply line, and the “On … wrote:” quote your mail app adds, are cut. This works for Gmail, Apple Mail, Outlook and most other mail apps.
• Your signature. Recognised signatures are removed from the text.

A comment can be up to 10,000 characters long. In practice, a reply longer than that almost always means the quoted email wasn’t removed properly, so it is refused rather than posted.

Replies that aren’t posted

Some replies are deliberately ignored. You won’t get an email telling you a reply wasn’t posted, so if yours hasn’t appeared after a few minutes, check this list:

• It came from a different address. A reply only counts if it comes from the address the snag email was sent to. If you forwarded the email to another of your accounts and replied from there, the reply is ignored. This is also why you shouldn’t forward the email to anyone else: replies are posted in your name.
• The email is more than 180 days old. Each snag email’s reply address works for 180 days after it was sent. After that, reply from the app instead.
• You can no longer see the snag. For example, you were unassigned, your access to the organisation was suspended, or the organisation’s workspace is paused.
• It was an automatic reply. Out-of-office messages and other automatic replies are ignored, so going on holiday won’t fill a snag with them.
• There was nothing in it. A reply with no text and no photos has nothing to post.
• It was too long. See the 10,000-character limit above.
• It was flagged as spam or a virus, or failed the checks that show it really came from your email address.

If none of these explain it, email us with the time you sent the reply and the address you sent it from, and we can trace it.

Adding photos

Attach photos to your reply as you would to any email. They are added to the comment in the order they appear in the email. A reply with photos and no text is posted as a comment with just the photos.

Photos you paste into the body of the message also come through. Apple Mail and Gmail put them there, not as attachments, and Rectify picks them up either way.

Limits

• Up to 5 photos per reply. Any after the fifth are left out.
• Up to 25MB of photos per reply, measured at the size you sent them. A photo that would take the total past 25MB is left out, though a smaller one after it can still fit.
• JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF and TIFF are accepted.

How photos are resized

Each photo is processed the same way as one taken in the app, so a photo sent by email looks the same as one added on site:

• Resized so its longest side is at most 1920 pixels. A photo already smaller than that keeps its size and is never enlarged.
• Saved as a JPEG, at the same compression the app uses. A 10–15MB photo from a phone camera usually ends up a few hundred kilobytes.
• Turned the right way up, using the orientation your phone recorded.
• Stripped of its metadata, including the GPS location recorded by phone cameras. The original file you sent is not kept.

Photos count towards your organisation’s storage, the same as photos added in the app.

Images that are left out

An email carries more images than the ones you meant to send, so Rectify leaves these out:

• The snag’s own photos. The snag email shows the snag’s photos, and many mail apps (Outlook especially) attach them again when you reply. Rectify recognises its own photos and doesn’t add them a second time.
• Images in the quoted email. An image that only appeared in the part of the email that was cut, below the reply line, is left out with it.
• Logos and icons. Anything smaller than 200 pixels on its shorter side, or smaller than 20KB, is treated as a signature logo or social icon rather than a photo. A very small photo is left out for the same reason.
• HEIC photos. HEIC, the format iPhones can save photos in, isn’t supported yet. Apple Mail on iPhone normally converts photos to JPEG when it sends them, so this rarely matters, but if a photo from an iPhone doesn’t arrive, try attaching it from another app, or add it in Rectify instead.
• Anything that isn’t an image, such as PDFs, calendar invites and other documents. Only photos are added to a comment.
• Anything over the limits above, or any file that can’t be read as an image.

Occasionally, a mail app changes one of the snag’s own photos enough that Rectify doesn’t recognise it, and it is added to your comment as a duplicate. This is rare, and leaving in a duplicate is a better failure than leaving out a photo you meant to send.

If your organisation is out of storage

If your organisation doesn’t have room for all the photos in a reply, none of them are added. Your text is still posted as a comment, without the photos. A reply with only photos isn’t posted at all. Ask the organisation’s owner about storage, or add the photos later in the app.