Shortly, I will be working with a school for the using my discourse based forum to improve the communication between school and parents (as a pilot program). One of the request is to have both parent’s email accounts connected with student’s name i.e. @studentname connected to parent1@abc.com and parent2@abc.com .
The students by themselves will not have an email account as they will be less than 14 yrs of age.
Is this feature planned, or any suggestions on how to achieve it?
This could complicated pretty quickly. What if the parent has two children who are students? Would they have to register twice? Thrice for three children? Etc.
Edit: Not trying to discourage you, just pointing out a potential pitfall.
What school basically want is, for every student notification should reach both the parents and as both / every students are different individuals they will have different accounts. But yes i got the complexity you are referring to. Thanks. Interesting week-end problem for me to ponder on.
That implies the parent(s) will have to have multiple email addresses if they have to register multiple times.
What about students who have more than two parents? I’m thinking of a student whose parents got divorced, maintained joint custody, and then remarried to different people. That’s four people who would need to receive notifications about the child.
Creating a default account for each student and just using auto-forward facility also may not work
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10957?hl=en
Note: While multiple email addresses can be added as forwarding addresses in the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab, Gmail can only auto-forward mail to one address at a time. The address that is currently in use is shown in the drop-down menu next to “Forward a copy of incoming mail to.”
You could:
In pilot program i will end up with 150+ groups and if succeeded and adopted school wide it will be 1000+ for each school. I am not sure, one group - one student will be a good way to manage.
Worst case I am thinking about having one default email account created for each student and pass it on to parents. Let parents decide how they wants to share among them.
Sorry to bump this up, but are there any options members can suggest?
I read through use of filters to work around the single recipient limitation in Gmail’s auto forward feature but then it is restricted to 20 only, so won’t work in my case.
Does discourse road-map have place/plan for this feature or it is too low in priority and complex?
The only other thing I can think of is to do what I suggested earlier, but on the mail server side. If you had a google apps domain set up, for instance, you could create a google ‘group’ for each student at:
You could then add each parent’s email address as an a member of that group. You would end up with the same number of groups to manage as in my earlier suggestion, but if keeping the group management outside of discourse is important then it could work. (for instance because you want to use groups to group together a set of students in a given class)
I accidentaly may have found a “solution” for your “problem”:
But let me tell you this is a tweak and probably not a feature. It may disappear in the future.
Your best bet for endurance is following David’s advice right there.
Also keep this special comment in mind:
My apologies for bumping this old thread. I know a lot of work has been going into Discourse to boost e-mail support lately, and one of the problems I’ve found managing mailing lists is that users often submit email from the wrong email account. It would be very handy to have alias emails so that when they submit emails to the server, they are accepted instead of bounced with a terse message (which is what happens now).