I (and others from Evolution mailing list) are trying to get to grips with using discourse in a mailing list type way.
One thing I’ve noticed is that the threading information on the emails doesn’t seem to be working. None of the message IDs in the References: header match up with other emails from the topic. I would expect a reply to at least mention the message ID from the messages it’s replying to, but it doesn’t seem to.
Things are made more complex in that I don’t seem to be notified about my own posts - so that any threads that I reply to are essentially broken.
The only consistent threading reference is to the original topic - i.e. <topic/xxxxx@discourse.gnome.org> so at least the specific topic seems to stay together - but even that breaks occasionally.
Does anyone seriously use Discourse exclusively by email?
When you are posting from the website you are not notified to the messages you are posting by default. To change that, you can do the following:
Expand your profile in the navigation section.
Navigate to Preferences → Preferences → Emails.
In the email settings look for the setting Email me when I am quoted, replied to, my @username is mentioned, or when there is new activity in my watched categories, tags or topics and change it From Only when away to Always.
Edit: It turns out I was wrong and own postings are not delivered by email even after performing these steps. I apologize for giving out inaccurate instructions. I don’t know if there is a way around this.
I have all the settings set to “Always”. But I still don’t get notified about my own posts.
On the mailing list if I send a message to the list, I get my own post like any other message to the mailing list. However with Discourse I don’t seem to get a copy, or I can’t see where to turn on a “Send a notification for your own posts” setting. I understand that this sort of thing doesn’t make sense if you are using it as a Forum, but if the user is trying to mimic a mailing list, it is important to also receive your own posts so that things like threading are maintained.