Ability to forward PMs to email and reply via email

Feature Requests Website Features
#1

ROBLOX PMs are great to a point, but they’re not scalable. They lack spam filters, organization, and other time-saving features like auto-sorting, auto-responding, and scheduled messages. All of these features are common requests, but it doesn’t make much sense for ROBLOX to spend exorbitant amounts of time re-inventing the wheel. Using e-mail as an intermediary that our PMs could (optionally) be forwarded to and responded from, we’d be able to set up spam filters for group recruitment messages, automatically sort feature request PMs by game, or auto-respond to “will u donate?” PMs. We wouldn’t have to limit our account to friends-only messages, completely putting PMs to waste.

If this is implemented, PMs should automatically be marked as read when they’re forwarded to e-mail so we aren’t doubly notified (once in e-mail and once on ROBLOX).

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Providing Player Support as a Roblox Developer
#2

I don’t think this sort of functionality should be built into ROBLOX considering most users will never receive enough messages to have use for it. I would rather development time be spent on reducing the amount of automated spam users receive, as this has a greater impact.

However, all of what you are describing is possible if you make a program which forwards all private messages you get to email, and then another program which receives emails and converts them back into private messages which are then sent to the recipient.

A while ago I made a Chrome extension to make it easy to auto-reply with a preselect list of responses:

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#3

It isn’t exclusively useful for extreme volumes of PMs – it’s useful for anyone with any sort of community responsibility on ROBLOX whatsoever (group moderator, developer, community organizers, etc) and everyone those people interact with. For example:

I don’t get a lot of PMs, but when I do get one half of the time it’s about a game I did contract work for in the past. Even though I don’t get a large volume of PMs, PMs forwarded to emails would help me because I could filter messages involving that game, and the regular players who sent me those messages would benefit from the automated responses that would quickly provide them with the information they need.

A Group Rank Manager in the Pokemon Brick Bronze fan group, or any group that deals with promotions for that matter, could filter PMs regarding rank changes into a unique folder, making it easier on them and also benefiting regular users because the receiver can prioritize that type of PM, and maybe even have a special notification for it.

Developers for any game could sort bug report / feature request PMs, and any person on ROBLOX could set up auto responses to common questions / concerns, providing instantaneous feedback.

PMs being able to be forwarded to email doesn’t just benefit people with high PM volume. It makes dealing with PMs easier for everyone, and improves the response time and quality that senders get in return. This is very similar to the process where all Studio features directly benefit only developers, but the benefits trickle down to regular players as well, so I don’t think there’s an issue of the feature not being beneficial to enough people – even if they’re not benefited directly, the ways the feature helps the intended audience will also indirectly help everyone else.

#4

Is there a convenient API for PMs?

#5

I don’t know the answer to that question but you can find out for yourself by going to your messages page and using your browser’s network console or an intercepting proxy such as Fiddler to see the HTTP requests.

#6

There is a pretty straight-forward API but I don’t think it’s fully documented somewhere.

For example this gets all full messages (with their properties, read/unread/user/etc) on the first page of the inbox:
GET /messages/api/get-messages?messageTab=0&pageNumber=0&pageSize=20

And for replying to a message:
POST /message/api/set-message

with a payload in the form of:

{
   subject: "Title",
   body: "Contents",
   recipientId: 12345678,
   replyMessageId: 12345678,
   includePreviousMessage: true
}

Sending a message (not a reply):
POST /messages/send

Payload in form of:

{
   subject: "Title",
   body: "Contents",
   recipientId: 12345678,
   cacheBuster: ...,
}

And similarly simple API for archiving or marking read/unread

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