Not sure if this is a bug, an intentional design, or some sort of user error on my part.
One of my users forwarded an email message to a private category. I saw it immediately, and since I hadn’t changed the forwarded_email setting to include the text, it was basically empty. I added that text to the body of the post. I also changed the title of the post, since the forwarded email Subject line wasn’t descriptive of why it was being sent to the category.
When I received the email version of the post after the 10-minute editing window had elapsed, the changes I had made to the body of the post were there, but the email Subject had not changed to reflect how I had modified the title.
That seems wrong—shouldn’t any change to the post within 10 minutes be reflected in the email that goes out?
In a support scenario where we use private messages sent to groups we often re-title messages and do not want customers to get confused with the re-title.
I am guessing some of our protection in the private message use case is leaking into categories, not sure.
It’s only based on the OP being a staged user. There are no restrictions whatsoever regarding PMs or any time limits.
I do think it’s the right behavior though, since most email threading is done via the title, it helps people interacting with a Discourse forum via email to keep track of the conversations.
But in this case, the user who forwarded the message into the category was not a staged user—he couldn’t have been because the category was private. So that’s not quite what’s happening here.
And while I can easily see why you wouldn’t want email subjects changing in the middle of the discussion, I changed the initial topic title, so no one would ever have seen an email subject change.
Sorry for the delay, I never got an email notification of your post so I didn’t notice it until I came back manually.
That’s interesting and unexpected. I assumed that when we’re talking about forwarded email, the only user in question is the person who’s doing the forwarding (call him Steve, because that’s his name), not the person who sent the original message that’s being forwarded (call them the RRCA, since it was a newsletter).
My assumption was that a forwarded email message was just plain text with some appropriate markers at the top.
What I don’t understand about this is that when I look at the staged user list on my site, I don’t see any email address related to a forwarded email (this one or any others that I’ve tested with).
I had explicitly turned off that switch because the address in question receives lots of spam—it’s taking over from an existing mailing list.
Steve is allowed to send to the category since he’s a member of the associated group.
I’ve just tested with the actual email in question again (but to a separate private category only I can post to), and this time the forwarded email came through, although in a text-only way that’s sort of useless compared to the original. So I don’t really know what’s going on here, but the advice would seem to be to encourage people to avoid forwarding heavily formatted messages into the category.
is the user of the forwarded email.
