Email rejection to "holding pen"

Continuing the discussion from Misleading email rejection when reply permissions not available:

Currently, the rejected email gets buried in my gmail server. I have no idea who is trying to respond. Typically, I create a read-only post and invite people to respond in another related topic.

1. Good: Is there anyway to change the email to read this is a “read only topic?” so people don’t respond. I just want “visit topic” and not reply to this email.

2. Better: Is there a way that the rejected emails can end up in a moderator mailbox?

3. Best: is there a way to put the rejected emails into some sort of “holding pen” i.e. uncategorized? I would like to move the responses to another category for discussion.

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I would welcome all emails which would otherwise be rejected to be placed in the Approvals queue.

Especially if I could change the “From” when people who are authorized to post from their Email A invariably end up replying from their Email B

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If the best option was chosen, as @watchmanmonitor points out there would likely be a need to change the owner of a post if the wrong email is used. One concern I have is that change ownership currently is an admin only feature, moderators can’t do it. Just something to keep in mind.

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I’m also interested in that. We’ve been using mail-in to a group inbox and it was mostly awesome, but a few times, we’ve missed some important mail because Discourse rejected it.
I’d love to have a way to ensure that every mail is received, even if it’s just to the “holding pen”.

Even spam emails? Can you clarify?

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Unless you invent a way to perfectly identify spam-mails, yes.

In our case, mails were rejected because after some forwarding, users accidentally replied to a topic they didn’t have permission to.

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I agree with @fefrei, even spam. There’s a reason all modern email clients have a spam folder/trap, and not a black hole. Algorithms aren’t perfect. Same reason Akismet requests a staff review, and doesn’t just delete the message. If an email can’t automatically be added to a topic for any reason, staff should be able to see both why, and resolve the issue so it can be posted without another email being sent.

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This is not an algorithm, in the case cited the user got a valid email reply back as to why the email was not posted. So your claims are rather hyperbolic.

No argument there. The user in the original example did get a valid reply, I was merely expanding on @fefrei’s post and your question (“Even spam…”).

To @fefrei’s earlier point - “We’ve been using mail-in to a group inbox and it was mostly awesome, but a few times, we’ve missed some important mail because Discourse rejected it.” This has been an issue for us (my site, not Stonehearth) because to the user they’re sending an email to a support email. They’ve been very confused (even when the reply from Discourse is perfectly clear) why their email was refused - they just expect it to be received, regardless of whether they have 20 characters in the body, 15 characters in the subject, etc.

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Then change those settings. Problem solved.

No, because there are still cases when Discourse rejects mails, like the one I linked above.

(I’ve had this happen with mails from a professor at my university. Ouch.)

But that’s global! We like the limits for most topics/posts, it’s just an issue with the few categories that allow email-in.

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Correct, there is no setting that allows anyone with an email account to post anywhere on the site. I do not think such a setting would be a good idea. To put it mildly.

No one is requesting that.

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Have you considered this @eviltrout?

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No but it would probably not be hard and would be an excellent use of the queue.

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