Hi Discourse Community —
[For context in this query, we are an open-source project using a Discourse-provided instance, for which we’re grateful.]
We’re running into a behavior that has been confusing for members of our community, and are looking for guidance or best practices for improving the situation. Specifically:
-
Email notifications sent by our Discourse instance display a
From:
address of[project]@discoursemail.com
along with theReply-To:
address that correctly routes replies back to the original topic. -
When recipients reply to such emails using “Reply” rather than “Reply To” (incorrectly believing that this will permit them to reply to the message’s original author, off-forum), they get the following message:
We’re sorry, but your email message to ["[project]@discoursemail.com"] (titled Re: [Subject]) didn’t work.
Do you use more than one email address? Did you reply from a different email
address? Email replies require that you use the same email address when
replying. Alternately, the Message-ID header in the email may have been
modified.This leads them to believe that there is a problem with the email address from which they sent the address rather than the one to which they sent it. But then double-checking, they find it is their account address and reach out for help, wondering what went wrong.
This leads me to wonder whether:
- there a way for us to configure the email address from which these mails are sent to be something more like
noreply@discoursemail.com
or something else that would look less like a plausibly valid email address? - Is there a way that we, or Discourse, could specialize the error messages for replies to the sending address to say something more like "You have replied to an email address that does not accept incoming mails. If you were trying to reply to a Discourse notification mail, please use the
Reply-To:
address or contact its author directly.
[I apologize if I’ve overlooked something before posting this. Though I’ve found other messages in meta.discourse.org asking similar questions, none have led me to answers. That said, it’s been challenging for me to come up with keywords that narrow the search results very well].
Thanks for any tips,
-Brad