When forwarding emails to forum, staged user is not the original sender

AI-generated summary

Issue: When forwarding emails to a forum, the staged user is not the original sender, but rather the person who forwarded the email.

Pad_Pors describes a scenario where an email forwarded by an admin to the forum is attributed to the admin, not the original sender. They recall a past behavior where the original email sender was created as a user in the forum, and question why this no longer occurs.

codinghorror explains that this is the intended behavior in Discourse, and the workaround is to have the original sender email the forum directly.

However, Pad_Pors argues that this can be inconvenient in certain use cases, where people prefer to communicate via email and may be hesitant to join a community. They suggest that the current behavior may discourage engagement.

codinghorror acknowledges Pad_Pors’ concerns but reiterates that this is the current functionality of Discourse.

consider this case:

  • user A sends an email to admin, (allowing him to inject his email to the forum)

  • admin forwards the email to the forum,

  • a topic is made in the forum with “admin’s email”, while the topic owner should be “user A” email.

  • and since user A is not created in the forum, admin can’t even change the owner of the topic to the real owner.

I remember it used to be the other way creating a user based on the original email sender, shouldn’t it work the same now?

That is the way this works in Discourse; you forwarded it, you were the person who sent that email. You’d need to get the person who originally sent the mail to send it to the correct email address.

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aha, I got the logic. but it’s a little weirdo in some use-cases:

people like to talk to people not to a robot-like email address. and those who communicate via email, are those who are still afraid to be in a community! in these cases, engaging them via email and communication with one person is much easier.

and then asking them if “it’s ok for them to forward their emails to the forum so that others can also contribute”.

they are usually ok with this, especially knowing that they don’t need to do anything else!

this way, one need to ask them to re-send their emails to another email as well! :frowning:

That is the way it works at the moment, though.

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