The discussion revolves around email rejection in Discourse, specifically when users reply to a topic they don’t have permission to post in. sjmscott wants to change the email notification to indicate that a topic is “read-only” and prevent users from replying. They also propose two alternative solutions: sending rejected emails to a moderator mailbox or creating a “holding pen” for uncategorized emails.
watchmanmonitor and jomaxro agree that rejected emails should be sent to the Approvals queue, allowing moderators to review and resolve issues. jomaxro also points out that changing the owner of a post is an admin-only feature, which could be a limitation.
fefrei shares a similar experience with missed important emails due to Discourse rejection and supports the idea of a “holding pen.” codinghorror questions whether spam emails should also be included, but jomaxro and fefrei argue that even spam emails should be caught and reviewed, rather than deleted.
The discussion concludes with eviltrout considering the idea of sending rejected emails to the Approvals queue, which they believe would be a useful feature.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
