Reply by Email questions

Support
1

Some of questions about Reply by Email:

  1. I see in the site settings the ability to disable Reply by Email. However, is it possible to allow Reply by Email, but only for Trust Level 2 and above?
  2. There is a related setting “Disallow reply by email after (N) days”. What does this do? IOW, N days after what?
  3. It appears in my testing that reply by email is allowed for PMs even if the reply by email setting is off. Is this correct?

Thanks!

4

Hi Loki. :wave:

There is not currently a setting for that. There are settings called email in and email in allowed groups, but these are for creating new topics via email.

If you share more details of your use case we might have an alternative for you.

The disallow reply by email after days refers to how long an email sent from your site may be replied to. The idea is that users won’t bump older conversations by replying via email, which isn’t an issue for most communities; if you’d like to disable it you may set it to 0.

It may depend on additional settings, and the user account sending the PM; for instance, admin users have the ability to send PMs to any user, as part of the warning system. Have you tried with a regular user account, on a site with reply by email enabled disabled?

Let us know where you are testing and we can check it out for you. :slight_smile:

4 Likes
7

Thanks for the explanations.

We are likely going to turn off Reply by Email for two reasons: (1) threads that go off track because users replying by email haven’t seen the intervening posts, and (2) moderator time cleaning up personal info from email signatures that sneaks through. We would consider still allowing RbE for >TL2 users since they are more trustworthy (if that were an option).

I understand the setting now. I think it would much more clear if the explanatory text read “Disallow reply by email (N) days after email sent. 0 to allow indefinitely.”

On further testing, it does appear that replies by email to PMs from regular users are in fact blocked when the feature is disabled. However, unlike replies to posts, these replies seem to just disappear without generating an error message. If this is correct, there really should be an error message generated so that the user knows that their reply didn’t get posted. I’d be interested to know if you can replicate this.

11

Thanks! We’ve passed this feedback along to our product team. :slight_smile: