Email response as private message

[Json_Blob (Jason Costanza)]

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?

[omarfilip]

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:

Difficult to tell that watched category notifications are to the forum

I’ve got a community of mostly older and non-technical users. Several times people have responded to email notifications to a public post as if the notification were sent to them rather than to the forum (or the person that the message was a reply to). In gmail, for instance, I see this: [image] If I expand “to pfaffman” I see that the message was sent to my email address, which still makes it look (to someone less familiar with Discourse than I am) like David is replying to me personally rat…

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

A user has asked if they can respond to a public thread notification email privately

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

[Json_Blob (Jason Costanza)]

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

[jeff_y]

@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.