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.