Editor engagement/Email notifications

Purpose of this document: Collaboratively drafted specification for improving the friendliness of MediaWiki's email notifications.

Current format (Wikipedia)
From: MediaWiki Mail

Subject: Wikipedia page User talk: has been changed by  Dear ,

The Wikipedia page "User talk:" has been changed on 9 November 2011 by , with the edit summary: /* Something something something */ new section

See for all changes since your last visit. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk: for the current revision.

To contact the editor, visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:

Note that additional changes to the page "User talk:" will not result in any further notifications, until you have logged in and visited the page.

Your friendly Wikipedia notification system

Problem statement

 * The sender name "MediaWiki Mail" is silly. The recipient doesn't care that MediaWiki is talking to them, and it's evident that we're talking about "mail". Most email notification services simply use the site's name as the sender name, e.g. "Twitter", "Google+", etc.
 * We don't have to describe this actions as the modification to a page. The recipient has new messages: that's the main thing we're trying to bring to their attention.
 * We should gently introduce jargon like "user talk page", keeping in mind that recipients of these notifications will often be new users.
 * See this blog entry as an example of how the current email messages can be perceived,

Proposed new format (Wikipedia, substitute with different site name as appropriate)
From: Wikipedia

Subject: , you have new messages!

Dear ,

it looks like you have new messages on your talk page on Wikipedia. It has been changed on 9 November 2011 by . The edit summary was:

/* Something something something */ new section

This is a link to your talk page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:

Visit this link to see all changes since your last visit:

To contact, visit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:

Note that additional changes to your talk page will not result in further email updates until you have visited it.

Yours, Wikipedia

Additional considerations
It would be nice to have an HTML-formatted version of the email for HTML clients.