Email From: headers lost their "via SITENAME" text

Continuing the discussion from Mail does not go out after recent update

I experienced this issue yesterday before the fixes were released. I was coincidentally migrating my notification email to a new domain and setting it up while the emails were broken. It led to a very confusing couple of hours!

On that note, I’ve spotted recently that emails no longer go out with the sender name that includes the site name. Where it used to say User Via [Site] it now just says User as the email sender name. Noticed this across more than one Discourse instance.

Having done some reading it appears there was previously a site setting named from_email which allowed for specifying this, but it appears to have been removed.

Is there any chance this is another bug related to these same changes perhaps? Or was there a new method for doing things / intentional design change I might have missed?

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The via is likely added by the MUA to show the Sender.

Can you dig out and show the From, Reply-To, Subject, and Sender headers from old and new emails?

There was not. There’s:

notification_email     # env var: DISCOURSE_NOTIFICATION_EMAIL
reply_by_email_address # env var: DISCOURSE_REPLY_BY_EMAIL_ADDRESS

There seems to be no difference in these headers between the old and new emails, except for the fact that the old From headers include the via statement.

(For context my site name is Collectives, my old domain was minecraftengineering.org and the new domain is saen.dev).

Everything was switched over except the notification email, which I didn’t change until a few days ago (I still own the old domain).

Old
From: Saen via Collectives <noreply@minecraftengineering.org>

New
From: Saen <noreply@saen.dev>

(Didn’t Change)

  • Reply-To: Collectives <incoming + [replykey] @saen.dev>
  • Subject: [My Topic Title]
  • X-Discourse-Sender: Saen

Maybe it’s related to the fact that I previously had different domains in use for the notification and reply emails, and now I have the same domain across both. Perhaps this triggers something in the clients that the “via” is no longer necessary?

The relevant change is:

I don’t particularly care about this myself, but how is including less information about why you’re getting email an improvement?

Another topic about this change (or this family of changes) complained that now it says something like “you got this because they replied to to a topic you were watching” (which has MORE information than the old way).

I can’t answer authoritatively, but I suspect it’s due to the site’s name already being present in the Subject line.

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Ah. That would make sense. So the Basic Principle is reducing redundancy here.

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