The discussion revolves around protecting members from accidentally sharing their email addresses when replying to private messages (PMs) via email. A user michellefs reports that a recipient replied directly from their email provider, exposing the sender’s email address in the full email thread. pfaffman questions whether reply-by-mail is configured and if the notification email matches the community’s address. tobiaseigen explains this is a longstanding issue with no easy fix, as email clients handle email addresses differently, and suggests obfuscating emails in PMs, though this could interfere with legitimate email discussions. RGJ investigates the technical cause, noting that trimmed content is always shown in PMs, even when the always_show_trimmed_content setting is off. zogstrip acknowledges the issue and supports a PR to allow admins to disable trimmed content entirely, proposing a new site setting with options: always, never, and private messages. RGJ suggests migrating false values to never for safety, and zogstrip agrees with the improved setting. ToddZ asks about the status of this proposed change, indicating it may have been delayed or dropped.
A member replied to a PM that I sent them and clearly replied directly from their email provider.
Below their response was “…” which opened a full view of the email thread.
From: my community’s email address
Date: Friday, March 4, 2022
To: their email address
Subject: something or otheremail body message
Is there a way to prevent this from happening?
Do you have reply-by-mail configured?
Is your notification_email the same as the address that posts to the entire community?
This is a longstanding issue and there’s not much that can be done about it.. the only way to not share your email address when sending a PM by email is to remove it before sending your reply. Different email clients handle this in different ways. In gmail the email address of the person replying is not included here but in other clients it may well be.
There are these admin settings you can try:
I guess one thing we could do is obfuscate any emails shared via PM.. but that would potentially cause problems in those cases when you are trying to talk to someone about email addresses!
So I was investigating an issue where reply-by-mail PM’s were leaking email addresses and disabling “always show trimmed content” did not work.
The three dots that show the rest of the email when clicked are shown when:
code:
# only add elided part in messages
if options[:elided].present? && (SiteSetting.always_show_trimmed_content || is_private_message)
options[:raw] << Email::Receiver.elided_html(options[:elided])
options[:elided] = ""
end
My question is:
I guess I wanted to keep the old behaviour but not sure it makes sense anymore with this setting. It’s a balance, on one hand you can leak email addresses, on the other hand the trimmer can sometimes remove important content.
I think that’s fine, but the trimmer isn’t 100% safe when it comes to “not leaking email address”.
Is this something you would accept a PR for?
Definitely 
Thanks @RGJ
What would the desired functionality be like?
always show trimmed content is false, it never shows the trimmed contentshow trimmed content with always, never and private messages as optionsI like that option better
Yes, me too. Next and hopefully last question: should we migrate a false value for always show trimmed content to private messages or to never. My idea would be to stay on the safe side and migrate it to never.
I came across this topic while looking into the settings trim incoming emails and always show trimmed content and how they interact.
I’m curious as to the fate of the idea that was raised here. Was it backburnered, or dropped..?