As Hypothesis we want to message our users so that we can gain feedback and make important announcements.

**Justification:**

Reaching out to users in-app for messaging, to gain feedback or to make important announcements is very common and employed by companies such as Slack or Trello.

We have the email addresses of our users but because of privacy restrictions we don’t currently have a reliable way to contact our users for product messaging, user research recruitment or marketing purposes. The following user stories are proposals for ways that we can better reach our users and engage with them proactively as we make improvements to our product via email and in-app messaging.

User Stories associated with this epic:
1. [As Hypothesis I want to be able to contact our user base via in-app messaging.](https://github.com/hypothesis/product-backlog/issues/430)
2. [As Hypothesis I want to be able to capture users opt-in consent on signup.](https://github.com/hypothesis/product-backlog/issues/431)
3. [As a User I want to be able to opt-in or out of my Hypothesis contact preferences in:
https://hypothes.is/account/settings](https://github.com/hypothesis/product-backlog/issues/432)
4. [As Hypothesis I want to be able to email users a link to opt-in to being contacted.](https://github.com/hypothesis/product-backlog/issues/433)

This is an epic whose scope is divided among issues 430–433; start by reading those linked user stories and their acceptance details. The work is complete only when the proposed in-app messaging, consent capture, contact preferences, and opt-in email flows have been defined and delivered.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.