@tobiaseigen: I hadn’t tried clicking on the envelope icon. That’s neat, but it not feasible as a workaround. I can’t possibly go around looking for posts sent by email and looking for forwarded content. Especially because we have some private categories on our site which I purposefully ignore unless I am @mentioned.
@sam: No forwarded email works. They come out like this:
We just hit this problem in a test instance where we are assessing Discourse as a ticketing system.
The test was done using GMail, a pretty popular service. Getting emails forwarded is not unusual in our context. This problem is quite a blocker for us…
It’s a bit strange that nobody has complained in the last years. Maybe there is another thread with a workaround somewhere?
Ouch. I was about to file an issue upstream (nobody seems to have complained about forwarded emails there), but the lack of activity is discouraging. Maintaining a local patch isn’t a great prospect either.
Our users are totally external, people sending email to what they think is a normal mailbox.
If you post the raw email with all its headers (or send me a PM) and tell as what you saw and what you expected to see, we might be able to figure this out.
You did enable the enable forwarded emails site setting, right?
OK, I tested again with the same email and now the forward does appear, no problem. It appears in a different way than expected (the topic appears as created by the author of the email being forwarded, not the email being sent, an this has implications we have to consider).
In any case, thank you. The big blocker is now solved.
Maybe the solution is to skip any removal of content in mailing list mirror mode? Mirror is mirror, and the risk of missing content is way more expensive than the convenience of not showing signatures (especially when we are thinking that Discourse becomes the de facto archive of a mailing list).
I guess we could add a setting to disable trimming for mailing list mirrors. It could make sense for lists where members know how to behave and don’t include hundreds of useless lines of text from previous emails. Can you create a feature request for it?
Nevertheless, I’ll try figure out why forwarded emails do not work for mailing list mirrors.
I think the typical forward would match the embedded marker not followed by a quote rule which discards it. Discarding is reasonable behavior for the other cases mentioned there (e.g. huge quote) but not for forwards.
I thought I had this turned on because my discourse did in fact accept forwarded emails and created posts. However, it stripped the content of the forwarded email. So is my understanding correct that what this setting changes is the way the incoming emails are parsed? Or perhaps more precisely: how incoming emails that are not replies to an existing topic are parsed?
In any case, I hope that activating this setting will solve the problem of forwarded content not showing in the posts. But I still wonder: Isn’t there an easy way to manually fix posts where discourse misplaced the cut-off line (between displayed and stripped content)?
Edit: Just found this new feature (which I haven’t got yet on that instance) so I’ll update, but could someone clarify how that new setting relates to what has been discussed here? Is it specific to mailinglists?
Edit2: After investigating a couple of more topics created via mail over the past months, it appears that the content of the forwarded mails is stripped only if there is some text added before the forwarded email (say, something like: “FYI” or “here is something interesting”). If the email is forwarded without commentary, the content is displayed (however, the headers of the forwarded emails are stripped so that it looks like the forwarder wrote the content of the post.) Is all of this intended behaviour?
