Emails in with already-used subject should append to that topic

[downey (Michael Downey)]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Ensure allow duplicate topic titles site setting is off (default).
2. (Optional) Email in a new topic with subject *Foo bar baz to the email address associated with either Discourse itself, or in this case, a specific category.
3. Read notifications via email and/or replies on the web site.
4. Later, add another post to the conversation by emailing the same address in step 2 with the same subject Foo bar baz (rather than by replying to a notification).

Expected behavior:

• The email contents are appended to the existing topic as a new post (i.e., a reply to the original post in the topic).

Actual behavior:

• The email is rejected with the “Title has already been used” error message.

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

This smells like a feature request to me.

Sounds like this fits under the overall banner of achieving more feature parity with mailing lists.

But even with this change, what if that topic is closed?

Or should sites using discourse as a mailing list replacement opt to have allow duplicate topic titles on instead?

Also:

Anon email-in should be able to add multiple posts to a topic

The way other (ticketing) systems handle this is to send an acknowledgement email to the sender. That contains the reply key so replies will get appended to the same topic (ticket).

[Mittineague]

Just because a Topic has the same title doesn’t ensure the topic itself would be the same. eg.
Trouble Installing Discourse

• heroku
• ubunto
• vagrant
• docker
  etc.

each is similar, yet each unique with different discussion

[lake54 (James Milligan)]

On our forum I’ve set the ability to have duplicate topic titles to on because (similar to @Mittineague) we’re going to have a lot of similar topic titles that are potentially completely different in content.

I think it makes sense for those disallowing duplicate topic titles, but perhaps have a setting to limit the length of time this check is carried out for? Default of 3 months say. If a new post comes in and the existing topic is older than that, it gets created as a new topic. Topic title is altered to something else (no idea what to suggest on that front though).

[mcwumbly (Dave McClure)]

Re-categorizing as feature based on the comments above… though I’m not sure this shouldn’t just be merged with the very similar earlier request.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

It definitely should, it’s the same request…

This topic is now closed. New replies are no longer allowed.