It is good practice to use the special email address info@example.org as an auto-responder: people sending a message to info at your domain will receive a specially crafted automated reply to introduce them to your organization and give them pointers to frequently asked resources.
How to setup a Discourse topic to automatically reply with a pre-defined message?
(If this is possible already, make a step-by-step guide to set it up.)
What are the advantages of using Discourse for an info@ auto-responder?
From the top of my head, I can see one: Discourse can easily aggregate incoming emails and stage users, rewarding an “asked for info” badge so that you can easily target potential participants (and weed out failing addresses, or put them into a junk email filter.)
In addition I would see the possibility to auto-respond to staged users that created new posts via email in categories that have email-in activated.
That way they would made knowledgeable of the fact that they are not writing to a mailing list, nor to an email inbox, and could be made aware of the fact that they are in fact interacting with a web-based communication platform.
Oftentimes our users do not know how they can interact with the platform, as it never actively announces itself to them.
This would also make way for helpdesk use cases, in which users hand in tickets.
I’ve been after this same functionality – mainly to send an autoresponse to people who might user our old mailman admin email addresses like list-unsubscribe, etc, to point them at the shiny new discourse that replaces the lists.
Not having found anything plug-and-play, I’ve got a usable solution that adapts the postfix in the mail-receiver container to automatically send a (rate-limited) response to anyone who emails a particular email address.
Because I’m not a postfix config guru I’ve only managed to get it working on a different subdomain than the discourse processed emails, which in our case is okay because all emails are coming through an institutional SMTP relay first, and that is separating out the discourse emails and forwarding them on to mail-receiver with the domain part of the email address changed (and since Discourse seems to pick up the email addres in the original To: field anyway this doesn’t matter to discourse). If an actual postfix guru can get this working just for a specific email address on the same domain that would be great!
It’s not written as a plugin and I might get round to doing that some time, but it’s not too difficult to install as there’s a setup.sh script that does (nearly) everything needed. It also does not actually use discourse, just the postfix in mail-receiver, so config within discourse is not yet possible.