A bug was reported where mailto links in Discourse emails are incorrectly formatted, causing issues with some email hosts flagging the emails as suspicious. The bug was identified by lkramer, who noted that when a post contains an email address, the underlying HTML in the email is incorrect, resulting in a link that starts with the forum URL instead of the “mailto:” protocol.
lkramer further verified that this issue occurs in all three types of emails sent by Discourse: activity summary emails, mailing list mode emails, and daily digest emails. jomaxro confirmed the issue and provided an example of the broken HTML. codinghorror assigned the task to neil, who has since fixed the bug and ported the fix to the stable branch.
Hello. A user of ours recently pointed this bug out out. It wouldn’t be too big of a deal except that his web host (Lunar Pages) actually flags his Discourse emails as suspicious because of this and perhaps other email/hosts might as well.
Discourse properly turns that into a “mailto” link on the forum itself. But when that post appears in a Discourse email, the underlying html is: <a href="https://www.forumurl.commailto:username@domain.com">username@domain.com</a>
I can confirm this (sorry for the delay) - the HTML definitely appears broken in the raw email. This affects standard email notifications (watching a topic, mentioned, etc) in addition to the emails mentioned above.