Reply To email address of post notification same as incoming category address?

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AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around configuring email settings in Discourse to align notification reply addresses with category-specific incoming email addresses. tomve seeks to use the same email address for both incoming messages and reply notifications in each category, as this would be more intuitive for users transitioning from a mailing list system. maiki explains that while disabling the reply key allows using a single generic address, it risks creating incorrect threads due to the loss of thread-matching reliability. tomve clarifies that the current setup doesn’t allow category-specific reply addresses when reply keys are disabled, highlighting the challenge of balancing user familiarity with technical reliability.

1

I’m trying to figure out if something is possible with the email address setup of a category.
Here’s our situation:

We’re in the process of setting up a Discourse instance that will replace an existing mailing list system.
We have a number of categories set up in mailing list mode, where each category has been given a unique custom incoming email address:

  • category-a@mydomain.com
  • category-b@mydomain.com
  • etc.

This allows users to start topics by emailing the category email address, and combined with the email notifications when someone creates a new topic or replies it seems to work quite well as a replacement.

However, one thing that we would like to change is the following: each notification email for a new topic or reply uses an email address with a unique reply key (e.g. 6add761a393219fd0f3aa6b4cf153959@mydomain.com) and this appears a bit confusing to some users.

I had a look through the settings and can see that it’s possible to turn off the reply key option (untick find related post with key) and remove the reply_key placeholder from the reply by email address. But then it would have to be a single generic address for all categories.

I’m aware of the impersonation risks when turning off the reply key setting, but as far as I understand Discourse would still be able to process incoming replies via email based on other email headers?

So my question is whether it’s possible to have the reply to email address for a post notification use the same address as the incoming email address for that category, as that is what feels most familiar to our users?

2

The reply-key solves a difficult issue: placing incoming messages into the correct thread. Whenever I don’t use the reply-key I get a lot more new threads that need to be combined.

You category-specific addresses should still work, they just won’t use the reply-key.

You should go for it, test it out. :slight_smile:

3

Yes, that is one of my concerns. I thought that the message ID header in the email might take care of this, but I guess it’s not as reliable?

The problem is that this is a global setting and I can only have a single email address for all categories, whereas what I would like to have is the specific category incoming email address. And I don’t see how that can be done with the current setup.