Avoiding the forum name in the email sender?

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In the latest version, the email sender is shown as, eg:

Peter N Lewis via Keyboard Maestro Discourse

How do I under that change? I don’t see any setting to control it, and my users are complaining about it.

Thanks.

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I believe it’s there so that when reply-by-email is enabled people don’t respond in the belief that the message goes direct to the named party. There have been a number of user reports that in this case sensitive information ended up in public topics, because they didn’t appreciate that the message had reached them via Discourse.

I’m curious why anyone would complain about it though? Did they say any more than ‘I don’t like this’?

Do you think explaining the context and purpose to them might help?

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You can customize almost all text that is displayed on Discourse or sent in emails from Discourse. Generally, you can find the text to customize by searching for the text at Admin / Customize / Text Content. Some text can be hard to find though. To customize the email_from text, go to Admin / Customize / Text Content and search for ‘email_from’.

For reasons mentioned in the previous post, you should consider leaving this text unaltered. It was added for a good reason.

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Many of my users read the forum via email, with all forum messages going to them via email. Since the forum also is tagged in the subject line and in other ways, the messages are typically sorted into a folder.

Given this, adding the large amount of noise of tagging every From name with “via Keyboard Maestro Discourse” is a lot of visual clutter. This is the difference, the old way:

image
image.png1060×420 72.6 KB

image
image.png726×482 22.3 KB

Ignore the blue difference, but even ignoring that, the first one is far far more readable than the cluttered mess that is the second one.

Just to add a bit more, Mail displays the list of names in a thread with commas between them, so the difference is amplified in that case, this:

image

or this:

image
image.png1396×32 5.77 KB

One of these is useful, the other is not.

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I disagree and am entirely with Peter on this.

All Discourse forums I belong to strongly identify themselves in the subject of sent emails:

[Discourse Meta]
[Keyboard Maestro]
[TidBITS Talk]
LNS

I know exactly who I’m talking to when I respond to one.

This issue of private vs public has been problematic for as long as mailing lists have existed.

People goof up and get embarrassed or worse, and you cannot save them from themselves in all cases no matter how you clutter up an email.

-Chris

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I believe adding the forum title to the sender name is a safer default. For two reasons:

  1. It makes it more obvious that the email was sent via Discourse.

  2. Some email clients automatically add the sender to the address book. If you are not really careful you might select the wrong contact from the address book and send an email to Discourse even though you meant to send the email directly to the person. You don’t have the luxury of seeing the forum title in the subject when you compose a new email.

As forum owner you can easily change that behavior if you dislike it. There are two options:

  • Configure a shorter title for emails by changing the email_site_title setting.

  • Go to /admin/customize/site_texts/email_from and customize the text. You can totally remove the “via %{site_name}” if you wish.

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