The discussion revolves around adding notification reasons to email notifications, similar to GitHub’s approach of including a cc pseudo-address that encodes the reason for the notification. nedbat initially suggests this idea, citing the limitations of current Gmail filters in distinguishing between different notification reasons. codinghorror requests clarification on the purpose of this request, prompting nedbat and jill to provide real-world examples of the need for this feature. Specifically, jill wants to filter notifications that mention her personally and flag them in her Gmail inbox. eLRuLL suggests implementing a solution similar to GitHub’s, where a mention email address is included in the recipients.
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?
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:
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.
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.
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 But if there was a separate field somewhere with these notifications that provided the info I needed, I could work around these flaws.
