Well I read Interacting with Discourse via email but it does not work. Good “start”…
Testing myself a bit Discourse these last 2 days, I actually simplified this to 2 simple steps for anyone who wants to receive all emails tagged ‘gimp’ in their email client and respond directly from there:
- Go to https://discourse.gnome.org/tag/gimp and notice the bell icon on top right, just above the messages list. Click it and select the “Watching” mode.
- Go to the “Emails” tab in Preferences and change the settings “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” to “always”.
Once you have done these 2 things, you will receive all the messages tagged “gimp” in your email client. And only those. I have tried for 2 days now, and it seems to work fine. You can normally respond by email too (which I am testing with this message itself). I think it will even handle markdown. Now you might be forced to top-post and copy-paste pieces of text you answer to (I’m also testing quoting here), because I’m not sure how the Discourse server will respond with pieces of messages mixed to the original text.
P.S.: in particular, there are mentions of a “mailing list mode”. Do not check this! Apparently it makes you receive every email from the Discourse server with a completely reverse logic, i.e. you have to explicitly opt-out to categories, tags… This makes this option absolutely non-usable in practice (especially since a thread can have several tags; so assume a thread was tagged “glib” and “gimp”, if you muted “glib” but want to see “gimp” threads, would you still receive it? Not even considering the fact that I’m sure new tags will come and it could be hard to keep up). So yeah, using the “mailing list mode” is a bad idea. But the 2 steps above worked for me so far.
P.P.S.: results from the markdown testing by email: quoting and syntax stuff like single and double asterisks (italic, bold) worked. But the newlines were completely broken (except for the first list item, all the rest came as a block). This will need to be tested more. This is the edited version, to be readable.
P.P.P.S.: oh there was also a link (the link to the “gimp” tag) which the system removed from the email. Is it a security measure? I re-added it.