Text of forwarded emails don't show up in posts

[alehandrof (Alex Armstrong)]

@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:

(Obviously, a forwarded email followed that line, but it was cut.)

As far as I understand, email forwarding as a feature is not implemented at all. What kind of information are you looking for at this stage?

The behavior I expected is this:

@alehandrof

All that my users were expecting to happen when they send an email to an email address associated with a category is that body of the forwarded email would be preserved. (It’s currently cut.) For our purposes it would be fine if it just created one post with the forwarded content inside a blockquote.

[icaria36]

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?

[icaria36]

@techAPJ

Currently we are using GitHub email_reply_parser to parse incoming emails

GitHub - github/email_reply_parser: Small library to parse plain text email content

Latest commit e50e502 on Jul 22, 2016

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.

@tobiaseigen

In the meantime it’s about user training.

Our users are totally external, people sending email to what they think is a normal mailbox.

Any ideas to unblock this situation?

[gerhard (Gerhard Schlager)]

The answer you quoted is quite out of date. We stared using our own gem a long time ago.

GitHub - discourse/email_reply_trimmer: Library to trim replies from plain text email.

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?

[icaria36]

@gerhard

You did enable the enable forwarded emails site setting, right?

Er… doh.

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.

[icaria36]

Is it possible that this problem can still be reproduced when Creating a read-only mailing list mirror?

We cannot get forwarded email through in a mailing list mirror category, while forwards land just fine in another category in the same test instance with posting via email enabled.

We are discussing this problem here and you can find several tests in this mailing list mirror category created to test this problem.

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).

[gerhard (Gerhard Schlager)]

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.

[Tgr (Tisza Gergő)]

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.

[tophee (Christoph)]

@gerhard

Du hast doch die Site-Einstellung „Weitergeleitete E-Mails aktivieren" aktiviert, oder?

Ich dachte, ich hätte das aktiviert, da mein Discourse tatsächlich weitergeleitete E-Mails entgegengenommen und Beiträge daraus erstellt hat. Allerdings wurde der Inhalt der weitergeleiteten E-Mail entfernt. Ist mein Verständnis also korrekt, dass diese Einstellung die Art und Weise ändert, wie eingehende E-Mails geparst werden? Oder präziser: Wie eingehende E-Mails geparst werden, die keine Antworten auf ein bestehendes Thema sind?

In jedem Fall hoffe ich, dass das Aktivieren dieser Einstellung das Problem löst, dass der weitergeleitete Inhalt nicht in den Beiträgen angezeigt wird. Ich frage mich jedoch immer noch: Gibt es nicht eine einfache Möglichkeit, Beiträge manuell zu korrigieren, bei denen Discourse die Trennlinie (zwischen angezeigtem und entferntem Inhalt) falsch gesetzt hat?

Edit: Ich habe gerade diese neue Funktion gefunden (die ich auf dieser Instanz noch nicht habe), also werde ich aktualisieren. Kann jemand jedoch klären, wie sich diese neue Einstellung auf das hier Diskutierte bezieht? Bezieht sie sich speziell auf Mailinglisten?

Edit2: Nach der Untersuchung einiger weiterer Themen, die in den letzten Monaten per E-Mail erstellt wurden, scheint es, dass der Inhalt weitergeleiteter E-Mails nur dann entfernt wird, wenn vor der weitergeleiteten E-Mail Text hinzugefügt wurde (z. B. etwas wie: „FYI" oder „hier ist etwas Interessantes"). Wenn die E-Mail ohne Kommentar weitergeleitet wird, wird der Inhalt angezeigt (allerdings werden die Kopfzeilen der weitergeleiteten E-Mails entfernt, sodass es so aussieht, als hätte der Weiterleiter den Inhalt des Beitrags verfasst). Ist das alles beabsichtigtes Verhalten?