Continuing the discussion from Auto-response email replies to Digests are processed as new topic:
These are still happening. 
Please PM me the email source.
You should make the notification email go to a different mailbox than the one used for email-in. I think that’ll solve it.
I agree with this @downey – you really should not use the same mailbox for “send an email here to create a new topic” as you do for “sign all emails as coming from this email address”.
I suggest noreply@domain.com or some other basic “hey don’t send email here please, it will be ignored” autoresponder should be your default email address in notification email.
1 Like
I’ve changed the value of notification email from discourse@example.org (which as @riking stated was the default/uncategorized email in address) to discourse+noreply@example.org. I also set up a filter in the Gmail inbox to automatically delete both:
- Any mail sent to discourse+noreply@example.org
- Any mail with a subject including “[Site Name] Digest”
It still seems a bit hacky if we can’t keep Outlook auto-replies from posting, but hopefully the workaround will prevent the problem.
Creating a new topic should be a fairly rare and specialized event… having the “send an email here to create a new topic” and “reply to this email for ANYTHING!” emails be the same is just a recipe for disaster.
I spent some time today on this issue, and it seems like the older version(s) of MS Outlook does not provide any header to detect if the email is auto generated or not. 
The only way to find if the email is auto generated is to look for “Automatic reply” at the starting of the email subject. Related SO question:
Not sure if we should scan every email subject for the string “Automatic reply” (including locale) for MS Outlook compatibility. Suggestions?
1 Like
Great research. There will clearly be pros and cons to this approach, but I’d go a step further and consider a search for “Automatic reply:” (with colon) at the beginning of the subject string, which would be just a bit safer.
1 Like
I don’t know if we care about Outlook 2003… that’s over a decade old at this point. I’d just check for the header. Checking the title string means the check has to be localized in 20+ languages. Not worth it for 11 year old software.
FWIW, Outlook 2000/2004 is 8% of email client market share. Almost just as much as Gmail.
That info is from September 2012 - would be nice to get newer stats (if available) before making a decision though.
1 Like
Yeah @downey given the 32% decline in Outlook (desktop) they measured year over year in 2012 and the INCREDIBLE velocity of mobile in the same time frame… I think we can definitively drop this. Long term all mail will be read on mobile, the trend stats are just overwhelming there.
1 Like
There we go. Serves me right for trying to do research on a mobile web browser. 
http://emailclientmarketshare.com/ is the Litmus profile that is updated monthly so has even more up-to-date data.
1 Like
I am closing this as “will not fix”, this is a bug in an old version of outlook that will eventually die.
Pretty sure this issue was fixed when I reworked our email in support
4 Likes