Email reply-to for digests

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The discussion revolves around email reply-to for digests in Discourse. mlinksva has set up reply-by-email, which works for individual messages but not for digests. They propose an idea to include all message IDs in the reply-to address for digests, allowing Discourse to guess which message is being replied to.

However, downey points out that this may not be feasible since the digest only includes titles or excerpts. mlinksva acknowledges this and notes that email replies to digests may have low value.

tobiaseigen suggests that if a digest only contains one topic, it should be sent as a notification instead, allowing users to reply. codinghorror agrees with mlinksva’s workaround of setting up an autoresponder for the no-reply email address to inform users that they cannot reply to digests.

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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.

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Customize subject format for digest emails
Adjusting Topic Tracking from Email Digest
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Since the Discourse digest is not actually an email digest in the commonly accepted terminology, how could someone reasonably reply via email to a message that is only referenced by title or excerpt in the email?

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Some people are apparently accustomed to replying to very brief mostly context-free messages. Like twitter users. :smile:

Seriously though you’re right. Email replies to digests almost have to be relatively low value, making case even edgier than I assumed.

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this came up for us recently as well - what often happens is a digest is sent out with only one topic in it, which not only looks odd because it says it’s popular but also results in people replying to it. Maybe if only one topic is in the digest it should be sent not as a digest but as a notification that can be replied to?

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This is the correct way to handle the situation. no-reply@example.com should have an autoresponder that tells users what they can do and what is going on if they make that mistake.

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