A number of our forum community members have requested how to begin a PM to another member via email? Continuing a PM via email works great, but not starting one. Any suggestions?
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You can’t do it for a single user, but you can for a group. You really don’t want to be able to send a pm via email because spam.
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Ok, I see your point (about the spam) because it could lower the barrier for bots possibly. However, our community is tightly knit (members can join only by invitation) and trust is high, so I don’t anticipate this being an issue for us.
With that said, maybe this feature could be configurable so that admins could turn it on if they want it and leave it off if they don’t?
In thinking how this might be implemented, I’m envisioning a format like this:
pm+USERNAME@myforum.site
A plugin would be required. I think I’d do it by creating a group for each user to use the built in group email functionality. If you’re interested, message me or post in marketplace.
EDIT: Oh. I pretty much always make the mistake of treating feature as if it were support. Sorry about that. It seems highly improbable that this would be a feature added to core, but I have zero say in whether that’s the case.
What if starting a PM via email was accepted only from email addresses corresponding to a registerd user (of some TL)? If the sole reason to not allow this is because of possible spam would that solve it? How hard is it to impersonate a “from” email. Also noted is that this would be an admin’s choice to allow this. Like the OP I run a small closed registration instance. Not a lot of chance some bot would randomly know both a sender email address in our instance and addressie username in instance.
If there are coding effort/reasons well, that’s another thing.
Either way likely not to be added to the core but could be at least initially a plugin?