Add tags by email

Feature
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1

I’ve had a request for the ability to add tags to topics when posting by email. This could work by adding a line as follows starting with tags: and then a comma separated list.

tags: tag1, tag2, tag3

I can see potential for difficulty, e.g. because there is no autocomplete people won’t know tags that are already being used and create duplicates, but I also think it can be quite powerful and help people to indicate organization they’d like without having to log in - and in my community many people just want to stay in their email.

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Hi!

We (@mcwumbly and I) would really benefit from a feature like this also. Was anything ever implemented that enables tagging topics that are created via email?

Thanks!

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Nope, nothing was implemented regarding tag creations via incoming emails.

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Is this pr-welcome material?

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It’s quite risky. How do you know what tags exist? What happens if you typo a tag? What happens when a tag is specified that doesn’t exist?

Just ignore all that? No feedback?

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I’m with you, Jeff. My opinion has changed since posting this request back in the day. Let’s keep it simple, and let the moderators garden and fix tags etc. If people want to indicate in their message where it should go that’s fine too.

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Here are some thoughts to address the risks that you identified:

The feature should respect that tags site settings, including “minimum trust level to create tags” If that is higher than the user’s trust level, then the tag would just get dropped if it doesn’t exist (which could be due to a typo).

If the user’s trust level allows them to create tags, then the new tag would be created (which could be a misspelling).

Yes, the chance of these errors is higher without immediate feedback, but on the other hand, this is a pretty “advanced” feature anyway, so I wouldn’t expect a huge onslaught of tagging mayhem were it to be added.

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It’s a pain in the behind to implement properly (allowing for localization and some leniency with format), a feature that is impossible to discover and dealing with edge cases is hard.

That said, I don’t see why not allow the community to send through a well specified PR, cause it is kind of important for mailing list parity.

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I have a different suggestion for adding tags by email:

email@forum.com is used for Uncategorized
accessibility@forum.com is also used for Uncategorized but adds the tag Accessibility in Discourse

Has anyone considered this?

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Many systems (incl. gmail) allow addresses to have the format user+tag@domain.com, routed to user@domain.com.

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I think Discourse already makes use of that feature for routing mail by category.

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I really like this idea! It uses the same workflow as categories and groups so it’s not something completely new for users to pick up on.

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Thanks, another way I could see this working:

email+tagname@forum.com assuming that tag is available to everyone group.

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Is there an update on it?

Can we mail in topics with tags support?

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Short answer is: no.

Several proposals were made from the original “add a line starting with tags: followed by a comma separated list of tags” to use x+tag@forum.example. Although I like the first one, since the second one is bound to break existing group and categories email-in configurations, I also understand the difficulty of having to deal with tagging errors.