Show categories in e-mail notifications

feature
#29

I’m trying to talk the folks at Canonical into moving some/all of our internal lists to Discourse, and this will almost certainly be a deal breaker. We need an easy way to be able to direct all email notifications from a single category into a single email folder (or tag in gmail). Right now, that’s impossible.

3 Likes
#30

@techAPJ worked on allowing custom email titles, where is that at? is there a howto?

2 Likes
#31

The “email subject” can be customized from Admin site settings:

Formatting:

%{optional_re} => Re: (applicable if the post is a Reply)

%{site_name} => [Discourse Meta]

%{optional_pm} => [PM] (applicable if the post is a Personal Message)

%{topic_title} => Show categories in e-mail notifications

Currently showing the category in email subject is not supported but I’m on it, and will create a separate howto for this once this feature is implemented.

8 Likes
#32

Oh, I was confused a bit, I didn’t realize you were outputting examples for this post, and since the output of %{topic_title} is “Show categories in e-mail notifications”, for a second, I thought the feature was actually done.

Let me know if there’s anything I can do to help, getting that done ASAP would be super helpful, since the anvil’s already hot over at Canonical…

3 Likes
#33

“Subject format for standard emails.”

^^^ That is terrible. Can you look at amending that so it either explains all the magic or links to a meta topic that explains that.

2 Likes
#34

Sent a PR for this feature:

4 Likes
"New topic in this category" email notification customization
#35

Notwithstanding the ambiguous “Subject format for standard emails” tip beneath the text field, this is still a bit ambiguous.

It would seem that %{site_name}, %{optional_re}, and %{topic_title} do not include square brackets but %{optional_pm} does. Is that correct? And what about the new (as of yet undocumented) %{optional_cat}? And are spaces not necessary?

#36

Just posted a howto for this feature:

4 Likes
#37

Hey @nukeador, has anyone had a chance to try out the new notifications on https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/ yet? It’s working pretty well for us so far and just wanted to follow up with at least one other group of mailing list users.

#38

Yes, we are using it right now and it’s working great :smiley:

Next improvement would be to have also better email headers for Lists so clients would be able to identify messages as coming from a mailing list.

#39

FWIW, there is a site setting email custom headers that we’ve added the following:

Auto-Submitted: auto-generated|Precedence: list|List-Id: <FROM-ADDRESS.example.org>|List-Unsubscribe: <https://site.example.org.org/user_preferences>

Where FROM-ADDRESS.example.org corresponds to our fromaddress@example.org that emails are sent from. Granted, that causes all Discourse notifications to have the same List-Id, but it’s good enough for filters if you add in the subject line. It’d be nice if there were a way to have different headers for reply notifications, such as Auto-Submitted: auto-replied, but maybe that will come in time.

We also took the site name out of the email subject, i.e.:

%{optional_re}%{optional_pm}%{optional_cat}%{topic_title}

… which makes it look pretty much like a traditional mailing list subject line.

#40

The email headers already include these list meta fields. Can you view source and specify exactly what you mean?

#41

@codinghorror I’m not sure about @nukeador but my concern with the default headers currently in place is that a new List-Id is generated for each topic, which makes it impossible for users to create filters based on that List-Id:

List-Unsubscribe: <https://discourse.example.org/my/preferences>
Auto-Submitted: auto-generated
List-Id: <topic.618.discourse.example.org>
List-Archive: https://discourse.example.org/t/some-topic/618

Ideal usefulness:
List-Id: <category.discourse.example.org>

Next useful:
List-Id: <discourse.example.org>

Least useful:
List-Id: <topic.618.discourse.example.org>

1 Like
#42

You are both right, I didn’t see that. And yes, list-id should be the category instead of the topic number to be useful for filtering.

1 Like
#43

Ok, @techapj can you make that change to include category / subcategory there as indicated?

#44

Also, IMHO, Precedence: list needs to be in there as well as a default. Without that, we get “out of office” bounce-backs that turn into uncategorized topics on our Discourse site. :slight_smile:

#45

Where is that header documented? @techapj fine to add that header, but maybe not for things like email confirmation of accounts, etc.

#46

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3834 in section 3.1.8. It’s interesting, because I just took it out a short while ago when I saw those other headers were now standard. It wasn’t an hour passed that I got an Outlook-generated OOO message responding to a digest, with someone’s phone number posted to our Discourse site. :smile:

(So I put it back in, for now.)

#47

Good to know, I wasn’t aware of that one. We’ll add it!

1 Like
#48
3 Likes