Email response as private message

I have a new discourse community starting up and we’re trying to support mailing list users as best we can.

A user has asked if they can respond to a public thread notification email privately, as a private message to the poster who made it. That word-soup sounds confusing so here’s steps:

  1. User A makes a new public thread on discourse
  2. User B receives an email notification of the new topic
  3. User B has two options
  • reply to the email which makes a public response
    or
  • go to the discourse website and click the username, click message, and then type their message as a private message.

Is there a shorter, email direct way of achieving that last bullet point?

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I don’t know if that’s possible, but users sometimes get confused about the intended recipient when replying by email. If a Public post —> Private email reply is possible, it should be very conspicuous where the message is going.

See this:

No. Discourse does not share email addresses with other users. They will need to visit the site and send a pm like you said.

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Gotcha, that was one of my suspicions unless you guys had some black magic in the background which would handle rerouting the reply somehow.

Cheers

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@Json_Blob you can use the plugin here, which will expose the sender’s email.

@pfaffman In order to keep email addresses private, would it be possible to replace the reply-to with an email alias that sends a DM? DMs are already sent and can be replied to via email.

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