Email-in to multiple categories

Support
1

Hi all,
We are using discourse as a replacement to our mailing list system whereby we email to certain email addresses which in turn post to associated categories and then notify the users. http://comms.southsudanngoforum.org/

Unfortunately when you include multiple mailing list recipients in an email discourse only posts in the category associated with the first email.

Is there any was to allow discourse to post the identical message in a number of categories? Any help will be highly appreciated.

2

I am not really following can you provide a more detailed example with specifics?

3

Thanks for responding Jeff.

If I have 2 categories, lets say A and B. A and B are restricted categories and have different users. Using Email-in I want to be able to post something to both category A and B. Currently it is only allowing me to post the message in 1 category, if I include my email in 2 categories it will only post to the category of the first email.

I hope that makes it somewhat clearer. Let me know if not.

4

This would be considered a duplicate topic in Discourse, and not allowed? Why would you want the same exact content in two categories? Google will also penalize you for duplicate content…

1 Like
5

Maybe a way to have it post to a single category as a Banner topic?

Or maybe Tagging it? (Assuming they’re Watching that Tag)

6

I hope that google doesnt index it as they are non-public categories.

Are use case is that we have different users receiving information in different categories and quite often we want to send both of them the same information.

A banner topic or tagging would only work for non restricted access though no?

7

Why not create a third category that is visible to both A and B groups ?

2 Likes
8

Id like to avoid that if at all possible as it would become very messy.

To have discourse used as a replacement to mailing lists, not allowing posting to multiple categoreies/lists is a weakness.

Is there not a setting somewhere that would allow duplicate posts in multiple categories?

9

Google doesn’t allow it. That’s the main problem. It’s duplicate content and it’ll be penalized in their index. Particularly if it is on the same domain.

How to Specify a Canonical with rel="canonical" and Other Methods | Google Search Central  |  Documentation  |  Google for Developers

Duplicate content generally refers to substantive blocks of content within or across domains that either completely match other content or are appreciably similar. Mostly, this is not deceptive in origin. Examples of non-malicious duplicate content could include:

10

It does not make any difference if the content is private and not indexed

2 Likes
11

Does it need to be categories or could you message both groups?

12

It would have to be categories unfortunately as the posts are emailed in and they would need to appear in the category for users to search past posts.

13

What happens if a user from group A replies to one of these common topics? Does group B see the reply?

What happens if you edit your topic? Does the edit show up in both spots?

If all you need to do is disable the dupe check without a concept of shadow topic in two spots it’s a fairly simple change

14

Group B wouldnt see the reply as group A would be replying to the topic in group A, same with editing.

Yes, disabling the dupe check is exactly what Im looking for. Can you point me in the right direction for where to find this?

Thanks all for your replies. Im super impressed with the quality of discourse and if I can work around this issue Ill be very happy with it.

15

If each group is to be isolated from the other discussion would not it be better to have separate topics?

I don’t know your use case, but if it is something like

What do you think of my idea?
Lorem ipsum blah blah

It seems it would be easy enough to make “personalization” changes something like

Group A, What do you think of my idea?
Hi Group A
Lorem ipsum blah blah

16

It makes it very burdensome when using email in.

At the moment instead of emailing a topic to Category A and B I have to email them individually and slightly change the text in the second posting to Category to avoid having it refused.

Can anyone point out where i can disable the dupe check that Sam mentioned?

17

@techapj perhaps we can add a site setting to skip duplicate topic/post check?

1 Like
18

Setting unique posts mins to 0 will disable unique post body verification.

You may also want to enable allow duplicate topic titles setting so that two topics can have same title.

3 Likes
19

@techapj I seen those settings earlier today, which solves the issue of having identical topics in separate categories.
However there is still a problem using email in to post in multiple topics, as the polling will only use the first email and ignore other emails in the ‘to’ field.

Is there a way to have discourse post in all categories which have associated emails in the ‘to’ field?

20

Actually I didn’t see the unique posts mins setting. I’ll try alter that now.