I know that it’s possible to reply to a message in a topic via email. I read that Discourse allows creating a new topic in this way. Is this option available on this forum? Can you reply to any thread using email?
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[!question] Maybe?
Discourse does have the ability to initiate a topic via email, but from reviewing the documentation, it appears we would have to create specific individual emails for each category that we would want to accept email topic submissions in. So to create a topic you might have to send the content to (for example)site-feedback at gmail dot com(don’t do this, it’s not real) and that forwards it to the forum.Then we would need to configure security settings because then if spammers got hold of the email to directly post on our forum categories they could hammer us without going through the account authorization process.
[!abstract]Can you specify your use-case for this? I understand some people like to interact with the forum offline under certain circumstances, but I can imagine how allowing non-forum members to just throw content at the board via email only would get chaotic. Is this potentially in response to the Forum update that requires certain browsers and hardware?
We can certainly discuss this internally but it would require creating and monitoring email addresses for each category.
[!warning]We already have to delete a Luxury Watches spam at least once a day because the spammers automatically hammer any forum or email domain that has “support” like our support@intfiction.org email. I can imagine if there were an individual email for every category we’d probably be deleting Luxury Watch spam multiple times a day for every category we have.
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It’s related to the availability of the site from different regions. Sometimes there are issues with this. I thought it would be possible to set up message reception only from registered users (i.e., from specific emails) and possibly with a sufficiently high level of trust.
So this is something we need to review to see what would need to happen behind the scenes and what the impact would be to make it happen automatically.
For now, if you have a new topic you’d like to create, go ahead and email it to support@intfiction.org and we can review and post it for you.
For the record, I’ve tried using email replies a few times and it’s never worked.
That functionality was down for a while last June-ish but has since been fixed and I’ve used it without issues, although admittedly only for PMs.
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Do you reply using the same email that is listed on your account?
Also, you can’t reply to the email digest (noreply email). I believe you need to have Mailing list mode enabled in your preferences to get separate emails for threads.
I’ve turned mine on to test. Replying here to see if it emails me.
I’m replying to Hidnook’s “For the record” email using my Gmail account.
Also, if you’re using the browser Gmail interface, note the message appeared on the ‘promotions’ tab and not the inbox. You can probably adjust that, but I think Gmail is detecting it’s from a distribution list and sorting appropriately.
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Here’s my by-email test.
EDIT: oh, would you look at that.
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Creating topics via email has to be set up for each category. It’s often used for a helpdesk type of situation, where those emailing may not even have access to the forum. Or it can be used to transition from an old mailing list to a forum. But we have over 50 categories (not even including the annual competition authors subcategories), so I just don’t think that it would make sense to set it all up for creating from email. Sorry.
You don’t need to have mailing list mode on, you can get emails just for your watched categories and topics:
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Some authors prefers communicating vía email. The emails got synchronized with the forum.