The work done previously to fix emails to staged users is fabulous and much appreciated, but there’s still some weird extraneous info that will confuse people unfamiliar with discourse, and maybe even consider it spam. I suggest you also remove it to make these emails look even more like straight email to staged users who don’t know they are being communicated with by way of discourse. Also the
It’s the user’s name (in blue and linked to discourse user profile no less), title and date right at the top of the message.
Also the [PM] in the subject (though less of a big deal) could be removed.
Sorry, what are you reporting here? We suppress the avatar image on short emails because Spam Assassin downgrades short HTML emails with a single image.
Hi Jeff! This is about emails to staged users, not long vs short emails. I’m suggesting the suppression of the user’s name (in blue and linked to discourse user profile), title and date right at the top of the body of the message. This makes it look more like a normal email from a human, which is what staged users (who probably have never seen discourse before) are likely to expect.
(I hope you don’t mind my slew of topics/replies dealing with staged accounts - had a few hours of testing it and identified a bunch of stuff. I’m sure not all of it will be worth pursuing!)
I think this’d be pretty easy to implement in the plugin I’m (still) planning on making removing that metadata from all emails, in a way that enables you to just turn this on for staged users:
Just a note to say that this feature is still welcome.
We are considering Discourse as a ticketing system following the setup of staged users emailing to groups. Our entire Discourse instance has access restricted to the members of our organization replying these emails. Staged users cannot see any Discourse at all, and ideally they wouldn’t even know it exists.
Now stage users receive two types of not only unexpected/pointless content, but sensitive information as well:
Link to user profile of the responder, which they cannot access and redirects to a Discourse login page that has nothing for them.
Footer with "Participants: [Group name] ([number of members]), [You], all with more links that the user cannot access.
Disclosing the number of members a group has might be considered very sensitive by organizations. Is there a way to remove this footer altogether?
Some feedback from my colleagues, who handle the email queues of our organization (the ones that are testing Discourse as a ticketing system):
If we go this route, it definitely seems to me like this would be something worth investing in. We get so many emails from people with little to no technological know-how, and I can see this causing all sorts of confusion.
I can definitely envision users clicking on the sender metadata in an attempt to reply and being majorly confused when they end up at the Discourse login page saying “An account is required.”
The weird metadata just makes our emails look like spam.
@LeoMcA or any other developer, today I am not (yet) in a position to make a request at the marketplace, but would it be possible to have a rough estimation of hours that would take fixing this problem? If we do move to Discourse, we will count fixing this task as part of the requirements.
