I have reply-by-email set up and it works great for individual message notifications. I had a user think they could reply to a digest, so of course they got a bounce from my configured noreply address. For now I’ve just made noreply go someplace I can check occasionally to let users know they can’t reply by email to digests.
I see in https://meta.discourse.org/t/auto-response-email-replies-to-digests-are-processed-as-new-topic/22564 another option is to have digest replies go to address for creating new topics, but this is messy and I don’t want to for the reasons mentioned in that thread.
What if digests got a reply-to with not a single messageid in the + part of the address, but all messages that are in the digest. Discourse could try to guess which is being replied to, and put the reply in that thread. Or put it in a moderation queue for assignment to the correct thread.
I admit this is an edge case and probably way more complexity than warranted, just noting idea as I have it. I’m fine with workaround of just not bouncing noreply and checking that manually on occasion, but if there’s another best practice I’m missing, or that is a really bad thing to do, I’d love to know.