When I setup email notifications, the email it’s being set as is the noreply email I set in the settings but the display name is the username of who posted. Is there anyway to set the display name to something standarized? Like CompanyName Community noreply@companyname.com rather than UserName noreply@companyname.com
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“notification email” in the settings.
The notification email shows up right but there’s a display name in front of the email that is the username of who posted/replied. That’s the part I’d like to fixed.
An option to specify the sender name would be nice! 
As far as I can tell, there’s nothing to “resolve” since this feature is working as designed:
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Your Site Name <noreply@example.com>for generic notifications not caused by a user -
User Full Name <noreply@example.com>for notifications specifically caused by a user
(The same structure applies to in-site notifications, too.) Or are you saying that the first scenario isn’t working? (In which case this would be a bug.)
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I think @Jared_Needell would like to have an feature/option to use
Your Site Name <noreply@example.com>
for notifications specifically caused by a user
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That’s correct @mr8 , if a user sends out a post and another user is watching that thread, I’d like the sitename to be the display name.
Hi,
I just wanted to chime in here and say this is confusing for our users. We do not have “reply by email” set up. However, since the displayed name shows the name of the user, we are seeing people respond to notifications via email. (which gets dumped into a system email account).
It’d be nice if i could change this to be a customized “On Behalf of John Smith” display name, or perhaps just “Site Notification” even for user post triggered notifications.
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I do not understand this request at all. If a notification is generated by a user, it comes from that user, because that user replied to you.
So you’re saying @Jared_Needell that in the case where you are watching a topic ONLY, the email should come from the site rather than the user?
I think a simpler solution is to simply set up reply by email @wglass. It’s not hard to do, and then users can reply as needed via email.
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When someone is watching a thread and someone else posts, you get an email but the email from the site. I’d like the sender to be the person who made the post.
The problem with this logic is that the sender name does not correspond to the sender address. An email client may not show the email address but only the name, so people respond normally by email, thinking that the sender name corresponds to the sender address.
This is a problem in my opinion. The notification does not come from the person who replied but from the system.
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Is there any update on this feature?
The actual from email address my forums mailbox but the display name on the from header is the poster where I’d like to append (Company Forums) at the end or make the display from header static to be “Company Name” forums@companyname.com rather than “Poster’s Name” forums@companyname.com
Hi, I found this topic as I was looking for exactly the same solution as @Jared_Needell.
The email notifications our users are receiving seem to be using an “on behalf of” mechanism to give the username as the sender, even though the email address from which the emails are sent is a system address. This causes all sorts of problems:
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It’s confusing to our users to receive emails seeminly addressed from usernames from our version of Discourse(which we call Springboard). They really should have an indication in the email sender name (not just the email address used) that the email is coming from Springboard. Without recognising that the email is coming from Springboard, the sender is not going to be immediately recognised.
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Emails seem to be consistently going to “clutter” - may well have something to do with the email address having no recognisable consistent sender name associated with it. The email address should really have a sender name associated with the email address e.g. “Springboard Notification notification@springboard.example.com”
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Once the email is opened in outlook the sender is lost, and because there is because there is no name associated with the email address the email looks highly suspicious.
To illustrate, I’ll show how our mentioned notifications look when they arrive in the inbox:
As our usernames are public and pretty anonymous, and email arriving from “simon” or “andrew” (can’t even use uppercase as username is always lowercased) seems pretty ignorable. Note the “properly formatted” email above it, which has the sender name properly formatted to display as Darts-ip News - using as “Darts-ip News news@darts-ip.com” email address.
Even worse, the username (simon or andrew) disappears completely when the email is opened (because it’s being sent on behalf of and there is no properly formatted sender name in the email):
Has anyone managed to get a sender name in the normal email addressing format set in Discourse?
Thanks!
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There are no plans to change this for the forseeable future, no.
Ok thanks - we will live with it because we love Discourse.
Though with 1.9k views this seems a reasonably popular topic… 
Thanks for pointing these out. I can actually add another problem which I had not previously associated with the sender name in the email but I now realize that changing the sender name would probably solve this:
I repeatedly see people replying to an email notification apparently unaware of the fact that this reply will be posted publicly. I have already customized the default text, stating clearly that if you reply to this email, the reply will be publicly posted on the forum, but people don’t read this kind of stuff…
If there was an option to specify the sender name for those emails as suggested by @mr8, people would probably be less likely to believe that replying to the email will send an email to the sender.
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Almost 3 years later, this is a feature that we’re still requesting to get added. The problem is with using this as an internal forums for my company, some users would think the forum post could be a direct email and reply thinking it’s only going to the sender.
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@codinghorror - Would writing a plugin allow for overwriting a variable on the user_notifications.rb file?
FYI @jerry0, @Jared_Needell , one (not so good) work around is to delete the “Name” field for all users and hide that field. If a topic creator has their name filled out in their preferences, the email from name will be the topic creators name. If the topic creators name field in their preferences is not filled out, the from name will be the name of the site. See the following thread for more info on a related issue I found:
https://meta.discourse.org/t/possible-bug-or-misunderstanding-about-topic-invitations/90710
I’ve figured out a workable solution for now.
You can enter the docker app and modify the user_notifications.rb file and modify the from_alias attribute.
I changed mine to
from_alias: "Community - ", + user_name,
You’ll need to restart the container after making any changes. Note that a rebuild/upgrade will revert the config back to whatever the default is.
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