Discourse using email

Discourse overview

You can do most stuff by email (provided your email address is in the system). For mails to get through, they must be sent from the email address listed in your MT account. Note that you'll need to use the browser or the app for one or two things such as voting in polls.

Receiving mails

1. The suggested way to get mails is by "watching", "tracking" or "watching first post" of the groups you are interested in. In some cases you won't be mailed if you've already seen a post online.
2. To receive emails for all unmuted groups, enable "mailing list mode" in Preferences+Email.
3. You can instead opt for a digest by enabling Activity Summary in Preferences+Email. You can select a time period of 30 mins, hourly, daily, weekly, monthly or six monthly. The blurb says that the mail contains "popular topics and replies". It won't include groups that you've muted, so mute "Development" if you don't want to see this discussion for example.
4. You will also normally receive a mail when someone mentions you in a post (as set in Preferences+Email).

Received mails follow a common pattern so you can set up filters if you wish, eg Tech emails look like this:

[Freegle] [Tech & ModTools] This is the subject line of a message

The Activity Summary mails will simply have this as the subject line:

[Freegle] Summary

Sending mails

As mentioned above, any sent mail must come from the email address of your MT account; otherwise it is rejected and a bounced reply sent back.

To start a new topic, you need to make sure you use the correct email address for the group. The email addresses are listed here: https://discourse.ilovefreegle.org/categories For example, to send to Tech, use this email: discoursereplies+Tech@ilovefreegle.org
Mails without a group or with an unrecognised group are rejected and a bounced reply sent back.

You can attach photos in sent mails.

To reply on a topic, simply reply to the mail - the "Reply To" email address makes sure it gets to the right place. It should only take a few minutes to appear on the forum. It is assumed that replying to Activity Summary mails won't work.