Email Functionality -- Notifications, Reply's & Posting

Discourse has a lot of Email functionality.

First you can receive notifications via email. You have to go to your preferences and turn on Notifications. You can then choose to Watch, Track or Mute categories or Topics to control what email notifications you get.

Reply’s via email. If you get a notification email replying via email is setup and working. Just hit reply and write your post.

Posting via email. This has not been setup, but it is possible. This gets a bit more complex and if we were to enable it likely it would have to be for members only, and also this would probably only be implemented for certain categories.

Let me know what you think about these features, and if you have any questions. There are also other options such as getting periodic email summaries, and enabling “Mailing List Mode”.

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Email reply seems cool but did someone say before that it’s going through google?

I’m sure some people will configure email notifications. I think that’s all we really need to support.

Personally I will just use the website. I suspect many people won’t bother with changing settings. It’s very good that emails are off by default because I remember the feedback we had about the emails from google groups :wink:

We’re trying to satisfy both crowds. People who love email and the way google groups functions can use mailing list mode. Those who disliked google can be free from having their inbox flooded with messages. If you’re somewhere in the middle of those two camps, well there’s a solution for you too! You can choose which categories to watch or mute which will filter what you see and what you receive in your inbox. The best of both worlds in my opinion.

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I’m fine with any of those options as long as by default email notification is not set. (It’s annoying to many users to register to a forum and then suddenly having forums posts/replies bomb your inbox when you didn’t set that up yourself) :slight_smile:

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The Google Groups can be imported into here as a archive, and depending on what members say and how email functionality of this forum works Google Groups may not be required.

I would prefer one option if that works out, but I am not sure yet.

Hmm? :slight_smile: I think the google groups are done now, right?

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I’m one of those “in the middle” of the two camps :grin:
I like the variety of notification options and the ability to change notifications for each conversation. Since adjusting some settings, I’ve not been overwhelmed by emails so far :slight_smile:

I’m a bit confused about the google groups discussion above. I thought this would replace Google groups or are you thinking of running parallel for a time period?

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I think Google groups should be turned off and everyone redirected here. It’s a channel we want to move away from. Why spread content across two channels when we want to drive traffic here.

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Clearly we have an early adopter group debating here right now. A decision on what to do with Google Groups is going to have to wait till we hear from other members.

I do have my opinion though.

It seems clear to me that we shut the groups down. (Just in case anyone missed my previous vote(s) :wink:

But if we don’t they will just die naturally anyway.

I have not actually tried mailing list mode and am not 100% sure how that works. Should probably test this and see so we can help anyone who wants to use it.

Creating posts by email is not setup. It is problematic because it requires a separate pop3 inbox for each category we want to allow post creation for. So if this was allowed it would have to be limited.

@bill do you know how many WCC email accounts we are allowed to have?

Hi @Steven_Stillaway, From what I can find, we can have at least 2000 accounts.

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