Topics with same title, generated from mail

Hi @riking and @Stephen

I thought I understood the state of Discourse after your comments on this issue last week (which I’d summarize as “by design, duplicate titles are accepted when sent in via the “email-in” functionality regardless of the status of the ‘allow duplicate topics’ settings because it’s not clear what else the site could do?”). But today, I find I’m confused because our scripts got a bounce for certain mails, stating:

Title has already been used

Did I misunderstand the state of things, or has something changed on your side since last week?

A few things have changed on our side which could explain the change in behavior:

  • I made the email address from which our scripts send mails into a “known user” on the Discourse site because otherwise I was getting occasional bounces, so thought I’d give it a higher trust level to work around that (in my previous messages, the script was acting as an “anonymous user”).

  • I added this known user to a group so that I could permit it to post topics to an otherwise restricted group (due to running into Category not accepting "anonymous email" from known users).

  • I turned off the ability for anonymous users to post to this category now that our script is a known user.

Assuming nothing changed on your end, is it correct that registered users are held to a higher standard w.r.t. not being able to mail in topics with duplicate titles than anonymous users? And is there a rationale for that choice? (I’d generally expect a registered user’s abilities to exceed that of an anonymous users).

Thanks for any insight here.

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