Import Previous Emails

Contribute Feature

AI-generated summary

Import Previous Emails: The discussion revolves around the feature to import older email chains into Discourse, making them searchable. YoavNordmann initiated the conversation, seeking a way to import valuable Q&A sessions from Gmail.

The team acknowledges the demand for this feature, but it’s a challenging task. sam mentions that it’s a “devilishly hard problem” and hopes to make progress within the next 12 months. zogstrip requested example email chains to aid in development, but Cozdabuch couldn’t provide them due to internal discussions.

The conversation is ongoing, with sam mentioning IMAP support is in progress, which will unlock some of the email chain importer functionality. However, sam later states that IMAP will take 2-3 months to be ready for usage at scale. nathank revisits the topic, suggesting a semi-automated process/plugin to parse email chains, which could generate topics and replies without notifications.

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Is there a way to import older mails into discourse which hold discussions.

I have a lot of chain mails which contains valuable Q&A sessions. I want to import all of this data into discourse and make it searchable.

All of the mails or on gmail.

Thanks for the help

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Note, this is a feature we really want to get to. “Forward long email chain to Discourse and have it untangle it, staging users and creating multiple replies”, unfortunately it is a devilishly hard problem. We hope to make some progress here in the next 12 months.

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@sam We are waiting… :wink:

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@YoavNordmann & @Cozdabuch, if you could send me (regis.hanol@discourse.org) some (< 10) of these email chains I would truly appreciate it. :+1:

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Regis,
I didn’t ever see you replied till now. (Little late).
Unfortunately I can’t forward any of our chains as they are internal discussions.

Have you had any luck with your work on the email chain importer?

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Not yet, still on the pipe though :wink:

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Pestering. Just pestering. Any word?

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Not there yet, we have IMAP support by @dan in progress which will unlock some of this.

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Hello!

Any luck with this email chain importer yet? :smiley:

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IMAP is getting pretty close to merge, but it will take 2-3 month prior to being ready for usage at scale.

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anything on the horizon?

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IMAP is a very very long game. We have some basic implementation but there are just so many edge cases.

We are though making some good headway around allowing a group to have a dedicated outgoing email box.

2 Likes
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Revisiting this, I’m often finding myself part of email chains that would do much better in Discourse. Is this still on the radar (clearly IMAP didn’t fly).

Parsing them correctly would be jolly difficult. I’ve done the odd one myself manually, which is doable but tricky (especially with time).

I do wonder if a semi-automated process / plugin would do the job quite nicely. I’m thinking:

  1. Title / Category
  2. A date / time picker
  3. A user selector which allows creation of staged users
  4. Post text that can be copied in
  5. The ability to add as many replies as needed with the same stuff

This then generates a topic / replies (without notifications) as a done deal.