New user here and not completely technologically inept. I am the director of a legal organization and our web developement team implemented discourse for our listserv.
We successfully migrated all of our members into the system. Everything seems to be running fine with one issue:
New post authors are not receiving a copy of their post in their email. To clarify, if I open my apple mail, email the email address, create the topic and hit send, that notification (watching), will go out to all members but I do not receive a copy of it. The issue is that many of our membes will email and they are unsure if their post went through. Our old listserve through drupal would email blast everyone including sending a copy to the original author.
I hope that makes sense and is clear. Is there a setting or way around this or should I inform members that they will never receive a copy of their initial post? To confirm - they DO receive the responses to their posts, just not that initial one.
Hi Bobbi – it is very active. Your question is a bit of a nuanced one because using Discourse as a listserv isn’t super common. I’ll tag our team to see if someone can help.
Yes, if users want to receive an email for every post that’s created on the site, including their own posts, they can enable mailing list mode. This is done from the Emails section of their preferences page. For users to receive emails for their own posts, they need to be sure that the “Send me an email for every new post” option is enabled. The other option is to receive an email for every new post except the user’s own posts:
Note that before users can enable mailing list mode, you need to be sure that the “disable mailing list mode” site setting is not enabled on your site. I believe that setting is checked by default:
Also note that you can enable mailing list mode by default for all the site’s users from that setting’s page. Users can still disable mailing list mode from their preference page if they wish.
I guess it’s also worth noting that mailing list mode can generate a lot of emails. If your Discourse site is hosted, it’s possible the hosting provider either prevents it from being enabled, or that you will run into issues with hitting the limit of the number of emails the hosting provider allows to be sent from the site on a monthly basis.
If mailing list mode is not enabled, I don’t think there’s a way to receive emails for your own posts just by watching a category. When watching a category you’ll receive emails for replies to topics you create, but won’t receive an email for your original post in the topic.
Thank you for that detailed reply! This is exactly what i need to do for my attorneys. I was able to do those things. Last question - as the admin, will I be able to enable mailing list mode as an override to all users or will then need to do this themselves? I’m not seeing that option in the Admin panel:
I’m not so sure it’s a good idea to be overriding user’s email settings. But as an easy solution, you can probably just hide that particular setting in the user preferences. In Common - CSS tab of a theme or theme component:
It is a good idea, I know my attorneys and my organization, this is why I asked the question. 95% of them want this. It’s easier for the ones who don’t want this to change it.
Do I need to manually go in to each user’s preference and check the box or is there an override where I can turn this on for everyone?
The “default email mailing list mode” setting that is enabled in your screenshot accomplishes this. When you enabled it, a popup window should have opened that has a button with a description asking if you want to enable the setting for all users “historically”. Selecting that option will update the email preferences for all users on the site, with the exception of any users who have previously disabled mailing list mode from their preferences page. Since that option wasn’t displayed to them previously, this means that all users will now have mailing list mode enabled.
If you didn’t click the button that applies the changes historically, you can disable the “default email mailing list mode setting” from the site settings page. After saving that change, re-enable the setting. The button to apply the changes historically will be shown to you again.
