Tutorial for using Discourse over Email?

Installation
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We are migrating an existing open source community to Discourse. Some members would like for it to continue to behave like a mail server, i.e. sends individual email that can be threaded by mail reader, and you can reply via email.

I believe that when Discourse is set up properly, and user set their own settings appropriately, that this behavior is supported. Has anyone any tips on the Discourse administrative setup side, and a tutorial that we can adapt to teach people how to customize their own settings?

– Christopher Allen

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Yes, it is supported. The relevant setting is called Enable mailing list mode and it’s in user settings under the email tab (forum.example.com/u/my/preferences/emails).

Once that setting is active, a user will get an email for every new post on the site and can reply via email.

Has anyone any tips on the Discourse administrative setup side, and a tutorial that we can adapt to teach people how to customize their own settings?

I don’t believe we have a guide for admins or a tutorial for customizing settings. Once it’s set up there isn’t a whole lot to configure.

The most important thing for an admin to do is ensure reply via email is configured correctly: Troubleshoot reply by email

For users, I think one of the most frequently asked questions is how to only get email from specific categories. To accomplish this, someone can visit the page for an individual category (e.g., https://meta.discourse.org/c/installation) and mute the category from the tracking menu (circled below). People with mailing list mode enabled will not get emails from muted categories.

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In my new discourse configuration, “enable mailing list mode” is off by default. However, in another Discourse instance it appeared to be on by default for all new registrants.

As our community is migrating from a list, where to I set it so that email list mode is the default?

Thanks!

– Christopher Allen

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In admin > settings you can search for “mailing list” and you’ll find default email mailing list mode. Enabling this turns on mailing list mode as the default for all new users. (If you need to enable mailing list mode for all existing members you can contact us at team@discourse.org since we host your site).

You’ll also see an option called default email mailing list mode frequency with a send an email for every new post except my own option, which you might want to set so users don’t receive emails for their own posts.

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