How can I fully personalise the appearance of emails?

Hello, hope you’re doing well: I would like to be fully able to customize how emails look (e.g: Change layout, remove profile pictures, round edges, etc), how would I go around this?

For example I want to amend summary emails:

And I would like to be able to customize response emails:

The image displays a partial screenshot of a messaging interface with redacted content, showing a misspelled text "testh ow are you !" and a section labelled "Participants" also obscured. (Captioned by AI)

Appreciate any responses in advance.

Not quite sure what you mean by customising responses since they are sent by other people (and I don’t think anyone responds to digests anyway…) but this is a good place to start: Admin guide to Activity Summary emails

1 Like

Sorry, let me clarify this when I say “customise response emails” I mean I want to amend the way it looks when a user gets an email notification when somebody responds to their topic.


In my use case, I have made it so that groups can be emailed.

Let’s say User A emails into Group B, then let’s say a member of Group B responds to User A’s message, User A will get an email which consists of a profile picture, message content and the name of the member from Group B, at the moment I don’t like the way the email looks.

For example; I want to remove the profile picture of the user that responds to User A’s message, I also want to change the way the text looks and many other factors of the email.


How would I go around doing this?

This may be a good place to start: Customize and style the Discourse outer email template

3 Likes

I’ve already taken a look at this, this does still not provide me with the knowledge I need to achieve the desired effect, this is as it only affects the outer email template. For example how would I go around removing these components?

I’ve tried changing the templates of my email notifications in /admin/customize/email_templates but none of the events seem to apply for when somebody emails in.

I’m all outta answers, sorry. Not my wheelhouse!

1 Like

I think your can hide them with css,though I’m not sure why you want the person receiving the message not to know who wrote it.

That said, I’m not quite sure where your customize the email css.

1 Like

Perhaps I will try amending the css via /admin/customize/email_style/css to see if I can get the desired affect.

1 Like

That’s where you’d do it!

1 Like

Just want to point out that in Gmail .webp images appear very strange…

Png Format:

image

Webp Format:

image

The WebP file bog-standard:

theguy


Luckily, this is not a crucial issue for us, but something I would like to point out for others.

It’s a complicated system, but that topic links to a topic about how to customize the inner content of email messages: Customize specific email templates. The idea is that you’re supposed to be able to customize the specific templates by selecting them from the admin / customize / email page.

For the User Posted template, you’ll see something like this:

%{header_instructions}

%{message}

%{context}

%{respond_instructions}

I think you could remove the bottom item from your screenshot by removing the %{context} placeholder.

2 Likes

Thanks for the reply:

I did try this, however, the event User Posted PM didn’t seem to work and the template didn’t seem to affect what the email returned, even if I overrode all the text to be a single word.

It’s been a while since I tested this, but I’m guessing that if you didn’t see any changes, you were editing the wrong template. Note that “User Posted” is the template that’s used for notifications about posts in regular topics, “User Posted PM” is for notifications related to personal messages.

Also, there are quite a few templates that are related to posting: User Mentioned, User Posted, User Quoted, User Replied…

2 Likes

Argh! I’ve tried changing User Replied, User Posted PM and User Posted. This is a conversation between a user and a group, could this be affecting it?

None of the changes I’ve made to the template have seemed to make any changes…

What action is triggering the email? For example, is a user clicking the “Message” button from a group’s page?

2 Likes

The user is a staged user that sends an email to the groups incoming email address

1 Like

How emails from staged users are handled is the one thing I can’t test locally. I’d still expect that replies to that email would use the User Posted PM template if the email is being sent to a group’s email address, or the User Posted template if the email is being sent to a category’s incoming email address.

I think Discourse have actually customized the email template that’s used for handling replies from staged users on Meta. I might be remembering that incorrectly though. In any case, it would be good to figure this out and add it to the list at Customize specific email templates.

1 Like

I’ve tried changing the User Posted PM template again but still no success.

You will have to modify these templates:

It’s beyond my knowledge, if this is possible via a theme component, or you would have to write a plugin.

1 Like

This is interesting, I’ve seen this, I’ve found some ancient posts related to this:

How to change the style of the email template of the digest? - dev - Discourse Meta

Example Plugin: Custom Activity Summary Template - plugin - Discourse Meta

A more recent one: How to show Full Name in Embeds - dev - Discourse Meta may be able to help me get the desired effect, I will try this later and I will let everybody know how I get along.