Is there an ability to like or +1 a post via email reply?
If it doesn’t already exist I’m imagining simply being able to reply with
like
or
+1
On the first line of the reply.
Perhaps the following lines could be a normally processed post?
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Meh. I think this is just one of those times to accept the limitations of email.
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I think we are going to need this for our Discourse instance as well. I think it could work by giving it some specific context like (+1) just to be clear that it’s not someone who wants the +1 to show up as a comment. Though… maybe you don’t want people on your forum to be able to leave just +1 as a comment.
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How would users know this is even possible? You would have to put a horrid footer on all emails with the necessary “commands”.
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I could see a “did you know you can also do this” email being sent to the user the first time they reply via email.
This email would help inform the user of the functionality.
Not every feature has to be immediately self-evident (or is that actually the policy for adding features?). There can be a guide to learn advanced commands, and they can be passed on through word of mouth.
I’m not sure why you would have to use a footer for this anyway. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to. If putting the suggestions in the footer is a bad idea, then don’t do it!
BTW, you can do sub-bullets on Discourse but there’s nothing in the UI that tells you how. In fact I would expect it to work like other software where you double up the character to make a single bullet but it turns out that’s not the case, you have to put a space before the dash.
- How did I figure out how to make sub-bullets?
- Because I goddamn wanted to make sub-bullets
- So I goddamn figured it out
- That’s how.
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There is something in the UI that tells you that; it is the default placeholder text in the editor that says
use Markdown or BBCode
So if you know Markdown (or BBCode), this bit of it to produce bullets is quite standard across implementations. It is like saying
use English
It is a known language.
I am not sure I like @DeanMarkTaylor’s idea of spamming every user with instructions but a help command that sent an email reply with the list of possible email commands (if you can guess what the help command is) would be OK.
This is very low pri from my perspective though…
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Cross-posting copy here for reference…
Continuing the discussion from “Like” button or link for email notifications:
Regarding adding a “link” to like a post in the email:
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My thought on this topic would be to have something in the footer:
[ Like ]( custom-one-time-use-link-which-did-nothing-but-add-a-like. No-login-required. Does-not-grant-access-to-the-forum. Expires-in-a-week )
I’d promote the heck out of it, over getting so many “me too” or “+1” replies.
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Dislike the idea of adding stuff to footer would prefer just to magically handle +1 and like replies.
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Without disagreeing with your sentiment Sam, I know that once any solution is in place, I’m going to append it the instruction in our email footers, regardless. If nothing else, they may be wondering why they never got their +1 reply email back, and who knows if they put 2+2 together to see that a like had been added to the post on their behalf.
Parsing emails has proven very difficult (we get many emails which include signature and full body of the reply in the next post, and with all the languages that “me too” can be translated to, the hit & miss magic is going to include a lot of miss.
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Using +1 is free of any language barriers.
You should be reporting issues with email footers appearing in a new topic so they can be resolved.
“me too” is not a reply I see this feature supporting.
“me too” in English does not appear to be / read as a command.
This would also usually fall below the minimum post length.
Minimum post length should still be enforced after “commands” are extracted and email footers are removed.
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FYI: I’ve been reporting this (email signatures appearing in posts) for several months now and providing sources of raw emails, but unfortunately no fixes have been discovered and/or successful yet despite efforts. 
I don’t think trying to increase the portfolio of already-brittle email-in functionality is the right approach here. Rather, we should be trying to get people on to the web site to take full advantage of what Discourse has to offer.
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While reading the code, I discovered some lines that suggest that this feature has actually implemented.
https://github.com/discourse/discourse/blob/master/lib/email/receiver.rb#L250
This feature is actually much more complicated to discover. 
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Yep, it was implemented as part of the MOSS grant, relevant thread here:
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Yay! Can’t wait until this is exposed through the email UI. 
There are no plans to expose this in mail UI – you’d need to Admin, Customize, Text Content
Understand that it’s something to be added to the template regardless, but my anticipation is more for this as a first step toward the proposed behavior in the RFC (clicking) more so than the like-by-reply.
How? what should be added?