Migrating from Google Groups

Continuing the discussion from Reply by email requires reply at top:

I’m assisting in the migration of a developer community to a Discourse install from Google Groups and we’re encountering some pretty vitriolic feedback. Predictably perhaps, a core group of users only wants to work via email and never wants to touch the web ui.

There are two key issues that block that workflow and if resolved would defuse the whole thing.

Inline comments in an email reply are borked

Whilst you can respond to an email with the “reply at top” inline responses require fiddly formatting of the email which despite efforts to educate users are simply not working.

Personally I think this is the real deal-breaker for my “mailing list only” brethren. I have to agree that if you can’t respond inline to emails then email is not really a viable interface to the forum.

While there appears to be some acknowledgement of the issue here and in the topics I’ve cross referenced, I’m not clear on whether or not this is on the current Discourse roadmap to be addressed. Can anyone shed some light here?

Less critical is email threading in Apple mail clients.

This is already discussed here and how-to here.

I’ve changed the email subject config which has helped immensely:

%{optional_re} [lucee] %{optional_pm} %{topic_title}

This config certainly improves things in Apple mail in that replies to a post are now appropriately grouped. However, the original post (ie without an RE) is orphaned from its replies. I could hack in a compulsory RE for all email I guess. I make note of it as others are bound to encounter the problem.

Not sure what more can be done here as it appears Apple Mail doesn’t respect the mail headers – mind you Google Mail doesn’t have the problem.

Edit: There is now an officially supported tutorial on migrating from Google Groups to Discourse:

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