Apply "mailing list mode" per category

[smichel17]

I’m confused. You can set the watch state per-category, so wouldn’t that do what you want? Yes, you need to do this initial setup via the website, but even mailman2 has a web interface to set up your configuration.

[Tomas_Hnyk]

Well, “watch” state, as far as I can tell, also means that when looking at the forum through a browser, I get notifications (the palid blue and green numbers on my avatar) about such threads. I would like to keep this for the part of the forum that mostly works as a forum, but I would like to avoid getting posts in that part of the forum as e-mails.

[kpedro88 (Kevin Pedro)]

I’m part of a private organization that is migrating from a (very old) custom forum/mailing list hybrid. Like some others in this thread, we historically had one mailing list per category, and are trying to replicate that behavior in Discourse to the extent possible.

In our case, most users are not subscribed to most categories. However, users are accustomed to being able to discover new categories quickly by visiting the homepage. Therefore, mailing list mode presents challenges: we currently have it set up so that all categories are muted by default and users have to choose which ones to unmute, but many are unhappy with this.

Alternatively, one could disable mailing list mode, leave all categories unmuted (therefore discoverable), and just choose which categories to watch and receive emails from. In this case, though, users do not receive email copies of their own forum posts, which is an inconsistency.

Simply adding an option for users to receive emails of their own posts in “watching” mode would resolve the asymmetry between the two options (mailing list = “push”/“opt-out”, watching = “pull”/“opt-in”). It would then be equivalent to the “mailing list mode per category” request that originated this thread. This would be extremely useful for us and many others.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

@kpedro88

Simply adding an option for users to receive emails of their own posts in “watching” mode would resolve the asymmetry between the two options (mailing list = “push”/“opt-out”, watching = “pull”/“opt-in”). It would then be equivalent to the “mailing list mode per category” request that originated this thread. This would be extremely useful for us and many others.

I thought we discussed having this option @sam? It doesn’t make any sense at all to me (why would I want a copy of a message I already sent), but as something people can opt-in to it is probably fine, since I know we’ve had discussion about it before?

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@codinghorror

I thought we discussed having this option @sam?

Yeah we talked about “echo mode” in the past but never built a toggle for it. It’s about 2-3 days of work to get this working properly, we would need a new site setting, a new user setting, a bit of UI to pick it and so on.

Not sure we should prioritize this work at the moment.

Previous related discussions:

Option to disable own post notification in "mailing list mode"

Currently users receive notifications of all posts in a topic, including their own. This emulates traditional mailing list behaviour, but many users are familiar with some mail client’s behaviour that “hides” these emails automatically. Perhaps there could be an option (off by default) to include the user’s own posts in notifications (on would notify them of their post, off would skip it)?

How do I stop myself from receiving email notifications for my own posts in mailing list mode?

We’ve recently set up Discourse, and I’ve found that every time I reply to a new topic, I will receive an email containing my reply. This seems similar to Getting notification when you reply to a topic, though this topic does not discuss email notifications. I feel like this is a bug as I know what I’ve just posted; I shouldn’t have to receive an email confirmation.

Per-category default reply when emailing in

While the category email-in support is maturing, are there plans for a feature where the user would get a reply from discourse when they email to a category incoming email address? this would make it possible for the user to add extra information to the private thread, since they now have an address they can reply to, and it would give some sense of “this email didn’t go into a black hole”. I couldn’t find anything like this on the private support portal page in regard to this but this would f…

[Tomas_Hnyk]

@kpedro88

Simply adding an option for users to receive emails of their own posts in “watching” mode would resolve the asymmetry between the two options (mailing list = “push”/“opt-out”, watching = “pull”/“opt-in”). It would then be equivalent to the “mailing list mode per category” request that originated this thread. This would be extremely useful for us and many others.

I will just reiterate that this would prevent users to use the forum in a hybrid mode where some categories are in mailing list mode and some are accessed through the web interface while having the advantage of watching some of the categories that are not in mailing list mode. As a workaround, it might do, but it is hijacking a feature (keeping track of selected topics of interest) in order to do something else (receive each post in a given category as e-mail).

In order for this workaround to work, “When I post in a topic, set that topic to” must not be sent to watching. However, when a user posts something in the parts of forum that are not desirable to be in this pseudo-mailing list mode, they will get e-mails when they are quoted, replied to or they are mentioned.

[nathank (Nathan Kershaw)]

@smichel17

After mulling this over for a while — as someone who uses mailing list mode, I have a concrete suggestion:

I think that you are spot on - your suggestion would bring a big dollop of sense a bit of the user preferences that have always caused me and my forum users confusion. You capture the four main options that people want:

1. Heaps of emails
2. Some emails
3. Just the Activity Summaries
4. Nothing

At present, users have to make it up from a few different places and some unfamiliar concepts. So most don’t bother and just stick with the site defaults (unless they get there via the email unsubscribe thing).

I’d nest Emails under Notifications in the /preferences as well.

In Mailing list mode, are all notifications suppressed at present? Because that would be super useful. I’ve had several users complain that when they visit the site (infrequently) they are overwhelmed by the number of notifications for posts that they have already read via email.