enable_forwarded_emails is a great feature for bringing existing conversations into Discourse, but for users who approach Discourse with a “Mailman-mind” - as many users on our instance do - this feature just doesn’t do what they’re expecting it to.
Within every email client I’ve used, forwarding an email intentionally excludes the original email address from the forward, and subsequent replies. Whereas with this feature, that original email address is included in the created post and subsequent replies.
If this feature isn’t enabled, then Discourse strips the actual forwarded email, which also doesn’t work for us.
My thought is there should be an alternative feature which doesn’t strip the forwarded email and posts it like so:
Thought you all should see this:
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Example Person <person@example.com>
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2019 at 15:11
Subject: An email to be forwarded
To: <some_discourse_user@example.com>The original email
This would be a lot like the result of the always_show_trimmed_content setting, but with the trimmed content automatically expanded (and therefore visible in email notifications).
@zogstrip what are your thoughts here?
With just a little bit of rejigging of the code you’ve already written for enable_forwarded_emails I think what I want to see would be relatively easy - and that’s rejigging I’m happy to do.
Perhaps the solution here is to create a new multiple-choice site setting, something like:
forwarded_emails_behaviour:
- hide (default)
- show (the behaviour I’m advocating for here)
- create_replies (the existing
enable_forwarded_emailsbehaviour)
! It’ll attempt to parse the forwarded email, then create a staged user from the original sender of the forwarded email, and post the forwarded email as the original topic and then any text the forwarder includes as a reply to that topic (at least that’s the way round I remember it working).