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1

Hi, it is not obvious that how could I use this forum via Email. Tried the setting menu to ask for an hourly summary but till now nothing received. How could I subscribe so I can receive emails for threads in this forum?

1 Like
2

Have you tried enabling the Mailing list mode under Emails?

3

Just turned it on. Thanks!

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I haven’t enabled it yet. Please tell me if it works.

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I’m in mailing list mode and get a steady stream of emails. Works great for responding, but can’t create new topics (yet) as far as I can tell.

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Works great for responding, but can’t create new topics (yet) as far as I can tell.

Yes, mostly. Although there are a few suboptimal points:

  • The lack of nested threads that email and usenet have is unfortunate.

  • There is a 10 minute delay between when posts are made and an email is sent. Not necessarily a big issue, but discussions can get confused when the participants have different latencies, especially without nested threads.

  • The syntax for quoting in email is entirely nonstandard and appears to be intended to be machine- rather than human-readable.

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@jjb, I agree with all of these things, but the only I could find a solution for is the email delay time. In “Settings / Email” the “email time window mins” says:

Wait (n) minutes before sending any notification emails, to give users a chance to edit and finalize their posts.

You can set this to zero to avoid the email lag time.

As for your other two points, I guess the best we can do is to file feedback tickets on meta.discourse.org. I wonder if email replying is easier in the plain text mode rather than the html multipart.

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I would lean towards plain text mode. HTML over email is just a waste of space in most cases.

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Just testing reading reply via web interface, in reaction to @jjb’s remarks. Wondering if it’s just a mail issue or total neglect for thread nesting by Discourse.

Edit: No threads! :fearful:

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The lack of threading does seem to be a deliberate design decision in Discourse. See https://meta.discourse.org/t/threaded-vs-flat-discourses-way-of-handling-responses-is-genius-but-i-have-one-small-suggestion/4053 for more background on it.

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It looks like replying by email with just “like” does what one would expect and it doesn’t produce a new post. Thanks, this is all I wanted!

2 Likes
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Not sold on the idea yet, but I’m considering it.

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Is there really no way to have proper email threading? I have no idea how to read the email stream that I receive currently … Also I am not fully sold with HTML emails. I guess I need to get used to all of this :older_man:

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“TG” == Thomas Gazagnaire ocaml@discoursemail.com writes:

TG> Is there really no way to have proper email threading? I have no idea how to
TG> read the email stream that I receive currently … Also I am not fully sold with
TG> HTML emails. I guess I need to get used to all of this :older_man:

It’s true that not having threads make things difficult to read.

Regarding html email, they are actually multipart. I use gnus here and
discourage the display of the html part doing this:

#+BEGIN_SRC emacs-lisp
(eval-after-load "mm-decode"
 '(progn
      (add-to-list 'mm-discouraged-alternatives "text/html")
      (add-to-list 'mm-discouraged-alternatives "text/richtext")))
#+END_SRC

The emails are then quite readable, with the exception of the threading
issue.

Alan

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@jjb, I agree with all of these things, but the only I could find a solution for is the email delay time. In “Settings / Email” the “email time window mins” says:

Wait (n) minutes before sending any notification emails, to give users a chance to edit and finalize their posts.

You can set this to zero to avoid the email lag time.

Perhaps I’m feeble-minded, but I can’t find this setting (expected to find it at https://discuss.ocaml.org/u/jjb/preferences/emails). Is it perhaps an admin setting you have for the whole instance?

As for your other two points, I guess the best we can do is to file feedback tickets on meta.discourse.org. I wonder if email replying is easier in the plain text mode rather than the html multipart.

Hmm, I have yet to look at the non-text email. :wink:

16

There are some different List-ID in the headers that might help filtering, e.g. I noticed:

List-ID: <learning.discuss.ocaml.org>
List-ID: <build.discuss.ocaml.org>
....

I’ll just have to teach my Sieve filter to create multiple levels of folders, I was using something like this for all the ML I subscribe to, which had the effect of spreading discuss.ocaml.org across multiple folders in my inbox :slight_smile:

[...]
if anyof(address :matches :detail "Delivered-To" "*",
         envelope :matches :detail "to" "*") {
    set :lower "dest" "${1}";

    if string :matches "${dest}" "ml*" {
        if exists "list-id" {
                if header :regex "list-id" "<([a-z_0-9-]+)[.@]" {
                    set :lower "listname" "${1}";
                    fileinto :create "ml.${listname}";
                    stop;
                }
        }
    }

    fileinto :create "${dest}";
    stop;
}
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@brab, I hope you don’t mind me editing your post to add code separators to improve the formatting of the Markdown.

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“AM” == Anil Madhavapeddy ocaml@discoursemail.com writes:

AM> @brab, I hope you don’t mind me editing your post to add code separators to
AM> improve the formatting of the Markdown.

Go ahead, I would not want to start an org-mode vs markdown war.

Alan

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It was purely to improve the HTML rendering of your comment. I am staying well away from any editor discussions :wink:

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I wonder if it’s practical to use the Discourse API to generate a Maildir of threaded plaintext emails :slight_smile:

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