# "New Topic via Email" button plugin

**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/new-topic-via-email-button-plugin/58554
**Category:** Plugin
**Created:** [March 7, 2017, 1:18pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/new-topic-via-email-button-plugin/58554 "2017-03-07T13:18:03Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1

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### Author: ![LeoMcA](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/leomca/32/87233_2.png) [@LeoMcA](https://meta.discourse.org/u/LeoMcA)
#### Post date: [March 7, 2017, 1:18pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/new-topic-via-email-button-plugin/58554/1 "2017-03-07T13:18:03Z")

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Introducing `expose-emails-in`, a Discourse plugin to “expose category emails-in in useful ways”, which should really be called the “New Topic via Email” button plugin, because it does this to your category pages:

![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/7/9/79c12b7edf145886e11541cb9ca403c1d0dc1464.png)

Clicking the plus opens the composer as usual, whereas clicking the envelope opens your email client populated with the email-in address of that category.

The plugin also changes behaviour for a logged out user, showing:

![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/a/c/ac81f981503aafb2ad17d5af666500d60f0703d1.png)

Here, clicking out the greyed out plus opens a modal prompting the user to log in, and clicking the envelope either opens your email client or the same modal, depending on whether the category is set to allow emails-in from strangers:

 ![](https://global.discourse-cdn.com/meta/original/3X/6/2/6268765d9f44e3a59d506dd06bc53c30a28ba9aa.png)

The text of the modal changes slightly when opened from the plus button if the category does allow emails-in from strangers, if you really want to get into the nitty gritty of the various possible states of buttons and modals, [knock yourself out](https://github.com/mozilla/parsys/issues/15#issuecomment-282786203).

You can see it in use on [Mozilla’s Discourse instance](https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/c/mozillians), and find the repo here:

[https://github.com/mozilla/discourse-expose-emails-in](https://github.com/mozilla/discourse-expose-emails-in)

Please leave your questions, feature requests, comments and bug reports ↓

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### Author: ![david](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/david/32/157490_2.png) [@david](https://meta.discourse.org/u/david)
#### Post date: [March 7, 2017, 1:36pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/new-topic-via-email-button-plugin/58554/2 "2017-03-07T13:36:23Z")

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Out of interest, what’s the “use case” for this? I would imagine if you’re already on Discourse, it would be easier to just use the composer to create a topic?

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### Author: ![LeoMcA](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/leomca/32/87233_2.png) [@LeoMcA](https://meta.discourse.org/u/LeoMcA)
#### Post date: [March 8, 2017, 2:27pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/new-topic-via-email-button-plugin/58554/3 "2017-03-08T14:27:20Z")

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> [@david](#):
>
> I would imagine if you’re already on Discourse, it would be easier to just use the composer to create a topic?

Indeed, but some people (especially within Mozilla) love their email clients.

The primary purpose is to provide a consistent method across categories of finding out the email-in address, rather than having to search through description topics or guessing based on the category slug, which was the case before.

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### Author: ![tomtjes](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/tomtjes/32/131271_2.png) [@tomtjes](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tomtjes)
#### Post date: [February 12, 2019, 4:23am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/new-topic-via-email-button-plugin/58554/4 "2019-02-12T04:23:52Z")

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It would be nice to have something like this in email footers, especially in mailing list mode.