Forwarding long email chains to Discourse

[danekhollas (Daniel Hollas)]

Continuing the discussion from Discourse Version 2.0:

@codinghorror

Forward long email chains to Discourse, creating posts for each email in a new topic, staging all unknown emails as new users and attaching all matching existing users by email

Can I ask whether there has been some progress on this feature and whether you have some timeline? This would be extremely useful as we are migrating from mailing list to Discourse forum. Thanks!

PS: I noticed that it seems to partly work, but not always…

[gerhard (Gerhard Schlager)]

Is there any reason why you aren’t using the mbox import script? It works quite well for migrating mailing lists.

Migrate a mailing list to Discourse (mbox, Listserv, Google Groups, etc)

This guide is for you if you want to migrate a mailing list to Discourse. It also contains instructions for importing messages from [image] Google Groups. 1. Importing using Docker container This is the recommended way for importing content from your mailing lists into Discourse. 1.1. Installing Discourse The import script most likely won’t work on systems with less than 4GB of RAM. Recommended are 8GB of RAM or more. You can scale back the RAM usage after the import if you like. …

[danekhollas (Daniel Hollas)]

The reason is I had no idea. Thank you. However, I am not sure it is applicable in our case:

1. We are on a hosted instance on a Standard plan
2. I do not think we want to import the whole mailing list, only perhaps a couple (10-20 max) of longer email chains.
3. When we launch the forum, we will not for certain reasons close the mailing list rightaway. I expect that some people will still occasionally use it. We plan to immediately forward any new emails to Discourse, but sometimes others might be quicker and reply and start a new email chain.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@danekhollas

Can I ask whether there has been some progress on this feature and whether you have some timeline?

Back on topic, this is something we really want to improve but it is a nightmare of a problem cause we have to parse text, to be honest I am not sure how “done” this will be for 2.0, we may have to bump it again to another release.

I think the use case of “oooooooops” this email chain just got out of control better move it to Discourse is something we really really want to address. But it will take time.

So I guess you are kind of stuck doing it by hand for now and rebooting the conversations. One thing that can help a bit is if you post a recap for the 20 or so topics and then invite the participants there.

It is really important to have “the right” tone set on a new Discourse instance and it sound like this is a great opportunity cause you have great example topics.

[danekhollas (Daniel Hollas)]

@sam

I am not sure how “done” this will be for 2.0, we may have to bump it again to another release.

Roger, thanks. Would you mind linking here from the releases topic for the other folks and perhaps post updates when they arrive?
https://meta.discourse.org/t/discourse-version-2-0/73729

@sam

I think the use case of “oooooooops” this email chain just got out of control better move it to Discourse

Yep, that’s exactly our use case …and the main reason why I was pushing hard to switch to Discourse.

@sam

It is really important to have “the right” tone set on a new Discourse instance and it sound like this is a great opportunity cause you have great example topics.

Thank you, appreciated, we’re working hard on that. We actually have some issues with tone, which poses some moderating challenges (e.g. how do you manage post/user that is not abusive but sets an overly negative/ironic tone). But that is a question for a future separate topic.

[zogstrip (Régis Hanol)]

You know what would help me a lot building that feature? If you could send me those long email chains

The more data I have to test with, the better this feature will be for 2.0.