Note that the sender names are listed (with an ellipsis if there are too many)
With discourse they look like this:
There are really 98 different senders in that thread but on first look it appears they have all come from the same person!
So many times this messes me up when I think e.g. “Why is X sending another message on this thread? I thought they just posted 2 minutes ago?” (Incidentally I have the same experience with Github notifications.)
It also means that new contributors to the thread are not as visible as they would otherwise be:
Compare:
(clearly a new contribution from Jason) with
The latter unread email is actually from a user named Sergio, not Knightrider.
Can anything can be done about this?
I assume that what causes it is all the Discourse emails coming from the same ‘From’ address. Could we not have a separate ‘From’ address on the Discourse site’s domain unique to each user? So I might be user-32q7qwhfwp@meta.discourse.com and any notifications of posts I’ve sent would come from that address?
Would this cause deliverability issues? I would hope not as long as the meta.discourse.com domain is verified with Mailgun or whoever…
Or maybe I’m wrong about the issue here. Thoughts welcome.
Probably fine, just worried about possible side effects. I support trying it out, but at the same time it feels a bit strange to me as we are “personalizing” the email address so the odds of someone seeing it and assuming that
meta+sam@discoursemail.com
is somehow an email they can use to reply to Sam… is much higher now versus
meta@discoursemail.com
Thinking about this a bit more I feel this is kind of a nasty hack and has the possibility to do more harm than good.