Content of incoming emails shouldn't be deleted when the "Mailing list mirror" setting is enabled

Contribute Feature

AI-generated summary

When the “Mailing list mirror” setting is enabled, the current email processing feature deletes content such as signatures and quoted replies, which can be damaging as it removes valid content from the mirrored emails and the category archive. icaria36 suggests instead of deleting, this content could be hidden behind a [...] button, allowing users to expand the full content.

However, gerhard points out that a site setting, always show trimmed content, already exists to show trimmed content, but this is not the issue. icaria36 explains that the problem is the forwarding content being removed regardless of the setting, and provides a test scenario using a Discourse instance and a Mailman mailing list.

1

Currently incoming emails go through a process to delete signatures, entire replies quoted, and basically any noise not part of the actual new message. While this is working well for the Reply Via Email use cases, for the Mailing List Mirror use case this trimming can be damaging.

In a mailing list mirror all content is expected to be mirrored. If actually valid content is trimmed accidentally, then not only the people receiving the emails will miss that content, the category serving as archive will miss that content too. This defeats the purpose of a mirror.

Incoming emails could still be processed trying to identify quoted replies and signatures, but instead of deleted they could be hidden behind a [...] button, leaving to users the option of expanding the full content.

Background:

2

Wait… that’s already possible by enabling the always show trimmed content site setting. Otherwise the trimmed content is only visible to staff. I thought you wanted to completely disable trimming of emails, because that isn’t possible at the moment.

2 Likes
3

No, the forward is being removed regardless of whether always show trimmed content is enabled or not. I just tested this scenario again, to be sure:

https://discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org/t/discourse-fwd-wikitech-ambassadors-tech-news-2019-week-04/1095

Feel free to test using our setup if you wish. We have got a testing mailing list with Mailman and a Discourse instance up to date.

2 Likes