# Email response as private message
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/email-response-as-private-message/98654
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [October 3, 2018, 5:33pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/email-response-as-private-message/98654 "2018-10-03T17:33:31Z")
**Posts on this page:** 5
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Json\_Blob](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Json_Blob)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2018, 5:33pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/email-response-as-private-message/98654/1 "2018-10-03T17:33:31Z")
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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### Author:  [@omarfilip](https://meta.discourse.org/u/omarfilip)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2018, 5:59pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/email-response-as-private-message/98654/2 "2018-10-03T17:59:24Z")
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](https://meta.discourse.org/t/difficult-to-tell-that-watched-category-notifications-are-to-the-forum/96418):
>
> 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: 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…
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### Author:  [@pfaffman](https://meta.discourse.org/u/pfaffman)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2018, 7:42pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/email-response-as-private-message/98654/3 "2018-10-03T19:42:32Z")
> [@Json\_Blob](#):
>
> 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.
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### Author:  [@Json\_Blob](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Json_Blob)
#### Post date: [October 3, 2018, 8:00pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/email-response-as-private-message/98654/4 "2018-10-03T20:00:50Z")
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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### Author:  [@jeff\_y](https://meta.discourse.org/u/jeff_y)
#### Post date: [February 19, 2021, 3:30am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/email-response-as-private-message/98654/5 "2021-02-19T03:30:31Z")
@Json_Blob you can use the plugin [here](https://meta.discourse.org/t/allow-reply-to-individual-instead-of-topic-forum-mailing-list-feature/44905), 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.