This is probably a holdover from folks that are using Discourse in a similar manner to old email listservs, but what I’m noticing is that many users signup for email notifications and then build a rule to shuttle them to a specific mail folder. Sometimes they look at the folder, sometimes they don’t.
At issue is when someone @mentions a user in a post, the Subject for the @mentioned notification is the same as any other for example, this message contained an @mention of my username:
[CLC-ListServ] [Staff] This is a test of a large image
I was wondering if email notifications that were @mentions to the user in question could have something added to their subject line, like:
[CLC-ListServ] [Staff] [@mention] This is a test of a large image.
That way we could inform users that they should build mail filters that treated these messages differently, so they were less likely to just end up in one of their Bacn folders.
Sometimes it takes a while for someone to come up with a great idea.
Seriously, though, in my community we are also struggling with people who are intimidated with discourse and rely on their email to keep up with discussions and to reply. Then discourse competes with all the rest of the information overload they grapple with daily, and the old school strategies they use (like filtering into folders) means that messages get lost.
The answer seems to be to get these people to log into discourse, but it’s an uphill battle. In the meantime, any tricks to help them to pay attention to the posts that matter, that show up in their email, are welcome.
We’ve been running our Discourse instance for over a year and this only came up recently. I think that as the number of posts has ramped up in our community, some folks have started building up their mail filters.
I noticed this because in the past month or so several times when I’d @mentioned people, I would NOT hear back from them. I checked Mandrill, saw they got a message. When I got in touch with them, they said they missed the @mention because they hadn’t reviewed the folders where the email notifications are going.
Actually this is another area where Discourse could offer something more than a traditional email listserv. To my knowledge, a traditional listserv doesn’t distinguish a @mentioned message from a list message in the subject either.
I wouldn’t classify this as a vital feature, but rather an added bonus.
Without this feature, how do you people distinguish regular emails from responses to your messages (so that you can skip the inbox for regular messages, and not for those that you are involved in) ? With traditional mailing lists, that was easy, since you are the sender of the original message and also usually at least in cc for responses, and this way you can just filter using your own email address. But with discourse, I’m the recipient of all messages, and I see nothing else that I could use in a filter…
Never came up with any workarounds, it is still what I would consider a limitation of the Discourse email platform.
But… with no upvotes in 10 years, it must not be a widespread issue.
PS Specifically for the @mention of your username, you could probably just build your email filter to look for that in the email body. But that wouldn’t catch any direct replies that you might have to a topic thread that don’t include your username.
