Users are discussing the loss of the via SITENAME text in email From headers after a Discourse update. Saen notes that emails now show User <noreply@domain> instead of User via Site <noreply@domain>, which was previously possible via site settings. supermathie clarifies that the via text was likely added by the email client and not part of the original header, and points to a code change in Discourse that removed the explicit via inclusion. Saen confirms the headers differ only in the From line, with the rest unchanged. pfaffman questions the benefit of removing this information, while supermathie suggests the site name is already present in the subject line, making the via redundant. The change appears to be intentional, aiming to reduce redundancy.
I experienced this issue yesterday before the fixes were released. I was coincidentally migrating my notification email to a new domain and setting it up while the emails were broken. It led to a very confusing couple of hours!
On that note, I’ve spotted recently that emails no longer go out with the sender name that includes the site name. Where it used to say User Via [Site] it now just says User as the email sender name. Noticed this across more than one Discourse instance.
Having done some reading it appears there was previously a site setting named from_email which allowed for specifying this, but it appears to have been removed.
Is there any chance this is another bug related to these same changes perhaps? Or was there a new method for doing things / intentional design change I might have missed?
There seems to be no difference in these headers between the old and new emails, except for the fact that the old From headers include the via statement.
(For context my site name is Collectives, my old domain was minecraftengineering.org and the new domain is saen.dev).
Everything was switched over except the notification email, which I didn’t change until a few days ago (I still own the old domain).
Old From: Saen via Collectives <noreply@minecraftengineering.org>
Maybe it’s related to the fact that I previously had different domains in use for the notification and reply emails, and now I have the same domain across both. Perhaps this triggers something in the clients that the “via” is no longer necessary?
I don’t particularly care about this myself, but how is including less information about why you’re getting email an improvement?
Another topic about this change (or this family of changes) complained that now it says something like “you got this because they replied to to a topic you were watching” (which has MORE information than the old way).