Notification reasons in the email?

My users are asking if there is a way to write gmail filters to treat notifications differently based on the reason for the notification. I couldn’t find a way, but I’m reminded of how GitHub deals with this: https://help.github.com/en/github/receiving-notifications-about-activity-on-github/about-email-notifications. They add a cc pseudo-address that encodes the reason for the notification, which makes it easily available to filters.

Is there something like this I’m missing, or could it be added?

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I don’t understand the purpose of this request? Can you explain why this would be useful / necessary with some real world examples?

In my user’s own words:

Has anyone figured out how to create a gmail filter to flag/label/otherwise distinguish messages from discuss.openedx.org which directly mention you? I’ve tried filters like this, but they just match everything, since the email “to” field always matches my name:

list:(development.discuss.openedx.org) "@jill"
list:(development.discuss.openedx.org) +"@jill" 

I’m afraid my only options are to a) remember to check the /notifications/mentions page often, or b) change my Discourse notification settings so that I don’t get every post sent to my Forums inbox, just the direct mentions or followed posts… which would be ok, but I do like having a very searchable record in my inbox.

Hi @codinghorror :slight_smile:

I’m a member of the discuss.openedx.org community, and would like to:

  1. get all new posts to that forum in my Gmail Forums list, so I can scan them easily, and visit them when I need more info.
  2. make any posts which mention me personally be starred or otherwise flagged in my Gmail Inbox, so I know I need to respond to them ASAP.

Currently, I’ve got #1, which is great. But because all the Discourse notification emails are sent to my jill@email.com, and because gmail doesn’t have an email body: filter or recognise the special @ character in search text, there’s no way for me to specifically filter messages which have @jill in them.

Granted, these are flaws in Gmail’s filtering, not Discourse’s problem :slight_smile: But if there was a separate field somewhere with these notifications that provided the info I needed, I could work around these flaws.

maybe something like Github, where they include the mention@noreply.github.com email in the recipients, this would be super handy really.