Display current “push state” to the user

🎯 The objective

The aim of this project is to support increasing trust in emails being delivered to your inbox, by informing the user of errors that occurred while the app was waiting for new messages via push. Success is when receiving emails is perceived to be more reliable for users and users can take action in case their configuration is not according to their expectations.

🎒 Resources

ℹ️ List all relevant resources like BugZilla meta bugs, Figma files, Notion links and other files.

• Suggestions
  • Show a message saying only a part of the folders are configured correctly
  • Point to a place where they can see the status
  • Stop push for misconfigured folders for a period of time
• Backend
  • Record errors states in a format that it can be passed on to the UI
• Issues
  - #5594

🦮 Rules of the Road

🟢 In Scope

• Show indicator in foreground service notification when push isn’t working for all configured folders
• Show more detailed information when foreground service notification is tapped

🔴 Out of Scope

• In-app error notifications (see In-app error notifications )

🚧 Technical and/or Business Requirements

Project tasks

Cross-Functional Tasks

🎨 Design

• Develop a design for the screen to display push error details to the user

⁉️ QA

• Add new test cases for release smoke test

🤝 Support - Product

• Update SUMO article to better describe the new push error handling

User Stories

Story	Description	Problem/Opportunity
Push service notification icon	As a user that hasn’t disabled/hidden the push service notification (“Waiting for new emails”), I want the notification to show when push is not working for all folders configured for push.	This allows the user to spot problems with push. Currently the app handles push errors by suspending push for the folder with the error for a certain amount of time. But this is not communicated to the user at all.
Push failure details via push service notification	As a user, once I realize there’s a push failure, I want to see details for the push failure(s) when tapping the push service notification.	This allows the user to see which folders currently fail to be checked via push. When available, an error message could be displayed to give the user an idea of what the problem is.

Design/Implementation Notes

Currently we display the “push info” screen when tapping the notification. It allows configuring the push service notification and disabling push for all folders in all accounts. The latter functionality should probably be removed since undoing it involves opening folder settings for all folders previously configured to user push and enabling it again.

It would probably be good if taps on the push service notification won’t lead to different screens depending on whether there’s a push error. Details on the push failures could be included at the end of the “push info” screen.

A list of possible push errors:

• Unknown error (no further details available)
• Authentication error (usually comes with a server-provided error message)
• Server error (server closed the connection with an error message that could be displayed to the user)
• Connection error (the device has connectivity but the connection to the incoming mail server could not be established)

Per-folder push state:

• Active (push for folder is working)
• Waiting (there was an error and the app will wait a certain amount of time before trying to open a push connection for this folder again; it would probably be good to display to the user the time when the app will try to connect again)

Note: The case where the device has no connectivity at all is already handled by changing the title of the push service notification to “Sleeping until network is available”.

Current "push info" screen: