Email notifications not grouping nicely in Mail.app

Feature
1

This was actually brought to our attention by @lightbody. Any idea why emails don’t seem to be getting grouped properly in OS X Mail?

c190ffd87e85d2af.png1520×340 44.3 KB

2

I suggest comparing the email headers, there are several that identify the unique topic number. Beyond email title of course.

3

I believe that Mail.app will only group the replies if they start with “Re:”. I would love to see an option to support this, as it is probably the single thing that is making me very hesitant to throw my lot in with Discourse and abandon YahooGroups - I (and others) need to be able to read and handle the support via email, and the lack of Mail.app grouping topics is a real killer (even if Mail clearly should be using other headers, but getting any changes from Apple is essentially impossible).

If someone can suggest a hack solution for this that I could try to verify that “Re:” would fix it, I’d be happy to try and at least ensure that is indeed the issue.

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4

Probably we should allow setting email header with a string and substitutions e.g. “Re: [{sitename}] {topictitle}” etc

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5

I have confirmed this with a change to config/locales/server.en.yml

user_posted:
 subject_template: "Re: [%{site_name}] %{topic_title}"
  text_body_template: |
    %{message}

After that, all mail messages (including the first of a topic) have the “Re:”, but Mail.app does properly thread them. So if I can figure out how to detect which posting is the original one, then I could make a patch for this. I’m also not really certain when the other mail messages formats are used (user_posted_pm, user_mentioned, user_quoted, user_replied) and whether “Re:” is appropriate for any of them.

6

I’ve just had this brought to my attention too, the user is on 7.3 (1878.6), apparently the latest current version with 10.9 (Mavericks). I haven’t had time to check the headers yet, but I’m quite confident it’s the same issue, as the screenshots are very similar.

The emails thread correctly in Gmail and on iDevices I believe, so it looks to be solely with Mail.app

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7

Just to follow up, you can edit the email title field default in site settings to add the re: as needed.

Seems like mail.app is about the only mail client that only uses title to determine threading, instead of the other mail header fields designed for this purpose…

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8

Fwiw, in our Zendesk, I had to have every email from our helpdesk start with Re: before mail.app would group the thread.

TIL that this is an option in Discourse! People with older installs may want to add it to the beginning of their subject lines.

(PS there is a space included with the optional_re, no need to add one before the [title])

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10

Was asked to bump this topic as it is still happening for me.

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11

I think that is just a partial fix, it means even the first post will have a "RE: " in it which is also confusing.

Perhaps we should change it so “RE :” is optionally added to every non OP post? I think we need a code change for that.

12

Yeah, or if you want it to be more general could have an optional template for replies the way the other template works.

13

After some more research, I found this is already supported via the optional_re tag in subject template. Seems to be working :slight_smile:

4 Likes