Some users on our forum would like the option to force an amount of context in the notification emails.
I suggest this is implemented as a user-configurable option with a site default (shipped as 0).
The current situation as I understand it is that context is included if the user hasn’t received that post in an email yet. Therefore, if they receive every email (mailing list mode), they’ll never get context. This can be confusing if they delete emails after they’ve read them, because there’s nothing to refer back to if the new post references something in that previous post.
This is also related to the Reply by email requires reply at top feature request, if users include quotes to provide some context, then the email processing breaks.
The option would force Discourse to include the previous # of posts made in the topic.
Glad to be directed here, as I had missed it when I encountered this issue and wrote my own post about people lacking context in email notifications.
A user-configurable option would work for us. But what I was actually talking about is the head-scratch-inducing fact that even when you have the admin setting “email post context” set to say 5 posts it does not show the 5 previous posts to people who have asked to receive every email.
This is the setting I am talking about:
I can understand that gmail users or users of clients that display threaded views of emails would not want to see this extra info, but some of my users have complained about the lack of context. I guess they are used to scrolling down to see what everyone else has been saying before replying, rather than referring to previously received emails or scrolling up to see the previous emails in threaded views.
@riking explains this is because the user has already received the messages. Makes sense, but not for the people who still want to see the context in every notification they get from discourse.
