How do I get every discourse posting in email, for categories I am watching?

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#1

I want to be emailed on every message, including the web posts I make, for the categories, subcats and topics that I am watching.

I have all the email items enabled, but not mailing list mode. I am not getting email for every posting.

Also, is there a discourse category where one can test postings?

#2

Being emailed with your own posts only happens in mailing list mode, but then you get the full force of every single post on the forum to go alongside that. The emails should have the List-Id header set on them, which is different for each category, so theoretically you could autodelete any posts which you didn’t want.

There isn’t, but you can PM yourself.

#3

Thanks for the info. And for the possible workaround, which unfortunately is a non-starter for the average user. (but it might be a suitable workaround for me short term)

So discourse’s current model doesn’t meet my standard for handling email - it doesn’t fully “subscribe” me to item X. (An example from bugzilla - I post a new bug report, I get an emai.)

#4

Not sure the average user wants to be emailed with their own posts. Happy to be corrected if more people post here, though.

If you were to use your email client to compose your discourse posts: starting topics by emailing the address found by clicking the :email: button on a category*, and replying to topics by just replying to the email in your email client, then you would have copies of your own posts too.

* there’s a few categories without email-in addresses currently including, ironically, the #thunderbird category - we’re working on fixing that: https://github.com/mozilla/discourse/issues/79

#5

If posting notification was the only reason people wanted to get emails, then that might be true.

BUT, if someone has email notification turned on there are two slightly more important reasons to want to see your own postings in email

  1. A local, hard record of what you personally posted. (Plus makes it easier to find and quote previous posted material.)

  2. Local searchability and threading of an entire conversation, PLUS OTHER conversations that may be related (that are not in discourse, think bugzilla for example), using your local email client. (In this case, searching only in discouse doesn’t cut it.)

And there are occasions when I want to use discourse web posting. So for these reasons there is no suitable workaround - I want ALL postings in email.

I think discourse should aspire to be both a full fledge mailing list replacement, as well as a full fledged web discussion list.

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#6

Fair enough, I can see the want for it.

Tracking it here:

I certainly won’t be able to implement it for a couple of months, might become a priority after that.

#7

Will this first require upstream changes in discourse?

#8

Theoretically anything can be implemented in a plugin, but I think it would make most sense to be implemented upstream.

There’s already a proposal upstream to have a “kitchen sink” email preferences mode, and having this as an option there would make sense when considered part of mailing list mode:

#9

Are there any news on this topic? We are currently planning to move a Mailman installation with 30,000 users on 200 mailing lists to Discourse. However, not being able to have a complete local mail archive is a no-go.