I’m continuing the discussion at Restrict Topic Replies to Topic Owner only .
The following is only about interacting with a Discourse forum via email.
Email and forums have different conventions. When someone replies to an email, they expect it to go just to the person being replied to. When someone replies-all to an email, they expect it to go to the whole forum / mailing list.
I’d really like to see the option where an email “reply” just sends a private message to the person being replied to, whereas “reply-all” adds the post to the topic.
Some context: a user wrote to me about getting too much email. They were pretty angry when their “private” complaint got emailed to the entire forum / mailing list.