How about a message type which will never trigger notifications?

[rowskilled14]

Suggestion
Something like /silent followed by a message, being the client usage. It of course will need a Matrix spec to support the functionality before clients can implement that type of format.

The idea being, /silent test message 123 would never trigger a notification for the other user, pending their specific settings. Keyword notifications or perhaps a special setting on their end could force override this rule.

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The use case for this could extend to many scenarios, but would typically revolve around the idea of: "I have something I want to tell the other user, but it isn't important right now and I have a particular reason to not bother them at this very moment, yet I still want to send the message right now." It could be that you know someone is in a meeting, someone is at an appointment, or it's very late at night and they're probably asleep. In each case, you might want the message to be ready and waiting for the user as soon as they're free, but you don't want to be a nuisance in the meantime.

Some bot/scripting/automated/API functionality could be utilized from this as well for similar lines of reasoning.

The message would show up with slightly different formatting in clients to indicate that it was a silent message. Something resembling a whisper type message from other chat systems. Nothing massively distracting, but just a small indicator of sorts.

Users could specify in their client a specific setting for how to receive these messages as touched on above. These settings could include:

• The ability to fully disable this feature on a per-room basis, a per-user basis, and globally
• The ability to choose between:
  • silent notifications still visually appear, but are silent/not noisy
  • OR
  • silent notifications not appearing at all until the user manually checks the client
• The ability to listen for keywords to override this feature

I'd be happy to submit an MSC if I could receive some guidance on how to approach this. I'm sure I'm overlooking a lot of definitions and potential issues, and I'm open to real feedback and discussion.

Thank you very much!