(Mailing List) Link to private message

(James Milligan) #1

One of the “benefits” with a traditional mailing list is that you can email a contributor directly. Discourse (amongst others) prevents this because it hides the user’s email address (a good thing).

Would it be possible to have a link to PM a user, either by going to the website (with the composer on screen, with their username filled in), or alternatively (possibly preferred?) a link to a tokenized email to allow them to initiate a PM with a user via email? So instead of replies+%{reply_key}, it could be pm+%{pm_key}?

A post-v1.0 in any case, but would really help sell Discourse to our members.

Full names on web but not e-mails
(James Milligan) #2

Just bumping this to see if the request is viable at all?

(Michael Downey) #3

To be fair, this is not always true, depending on how the mailing list is configured. :wink:

A two-click workaround is to click on the user name at the top of the notification, then click the “Private Message” button on that user’s profile page. But yeah, maybe an extra PM link near the name could be helpful.

(James Milligan) #4

It’s definitely a route that many people can take, but for email-only users this would mean they had to log in (potentially an extra step or two).

A tokenized address as mentioned in my OP would be spot on.

(Jeff Atwood) #5

Pretty sure @paully21 has also requested this.

(Michael Downey) #6

Yeah, a tokenized email link seems pretty good as long as it doesn’t end up in the From: field. If it did, then it’d likely hurt deliverability with a lot of providers, and might make it difficult for some people who rely on it for sorting/filtering email.

(Paul Apostolos) #7

We ended up customizing the template for notifications to include the instructions for private messages.

(Jeff Atwood) #8

All my :email: peeps in one topic. :sob:

Keep the feedback coming, email lists are the first item in this bulleted list for a reason

(Jeff Atwood) #9

@techapj added the ability to trigger a new post via URL recently, perhaps it could be extended to trigger a PM as well if the target is a user, and the user has TL1…

(Michael Downey) #10

Being one of the proponents of this last year, I think that’d be a suitable (and improved) workaround.

Related thoughts: Is there any way to avoid forcing a user to sign in to Discourse if she has the right token in a URL? Is that a security concern? What about SSO?

(Arpit Jalan) #11

Done via: