Email, Cc, and removing people from Cc

Product Support

AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around how Discourse handles email conversations, particularly when a participant is dropped from a reply. hellekin outlined a scenario where a conversation starts via email with N participants, including one that is an incoming address for Discourse, and then a reply is made by email, dropping one original participant.

simon explained that when a user replies to a group PM, they are actually replying to a reply key, not directly to the users. He also clarified that there is no option to remove users from the PM via email, and instead, users must be removed via the Discourse UI. If a removed user attempts to reply to the PM, they will receive an error message.

Regarding hellekin’s questions, simon confirmed that the ‘dropped’ email participant will not be dropped from the Discourse topic, but will only be notified of the response if they attempt to reply to the email after being removed via the UI. The removed user will then receive an email indicating that something has gone wrong.

1

Situation

  1. A conversation starts via email with N participants, including one that is an incoming address for Discourse.
  2. As normal, a new topic is created with all the participants.
  3. At some point, a reply is made by email, dropping one original participant.

Questions

  • Will the ‘dropped’ email participant be also dropped from the Discourse topic?
  • Will the ‘dropped’ email participant be notified of, or receive the response by Discourse?
  • How does the account type (staged or active) influence this behavior?

Thank you

2

I’m usually on the receiving end of emails that are sent to Discourse, not the sending end, so this is a good chance to confirm how things work.

When a user replies to a group PM, they aren’t replying directly to the users, they are replying to a reply key. For example, something like simon+0b436b95dc22685a28e15e5d34da413e@discoursemail.com. There is no option to remove users from the PM via email. If you want to remove a user, staged or not, from a group PM, you need to remove the user via the Discourse UI:

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After having done that, if the removed user attempts to reply to the PM that’s in their inbox, they will receive a response similar to this:

We’re sorry, but your email message to [“simon+0b436b95dc22685a28e15e5d34da413e@discoursemail.com”] (titled Re: Testing creating a PM via email) didn’t work.

Reason:

Something has gone wrong. Perhaps this topic was closed or deleted while you were looking at it?

If you can correct the problem, please try again.

Note that the reply keys posted above are not the actual reply keys for my test site.

Only if they attempt to reply to the email after having been removed via the UI. In that case, they’ll get the email that I posted above.

One thing I’m not sure about is that when I removed a user from the PM and then tried to respond as that user to the PM, the email that was set was email_reject_invalid_post_specified. I can find that email’s content on my site’s Admin / Customize / Text section - it has the key system_messages.email_reject_invalid_post_specified.text_body_template - but I’m not finding that email in the Admin / Customize / Emails section of my site. I’d expect to be able to edit the email from that section. I’ll look into what’s going on with that.