Like many others, I strongly prefer to interact via email instead of a web interface. I have subscribed to numerous mailing lists over the years, and I feel comfortable with the format.
Myself and others have lamented in the past about this new mailing list, and although nothing was done about the points we made, this post is not about those issues. I frequently do not receive emails to the list or the headers are out of sync and therefore my email client (Gmail) does not group them together.
Elasticsearch employees such as David Pilato and Nik Everett never start a thread asking for help, so when I see a thread by them, I know something is wrong. In David's example, you can see the post he responded to just below.
Even if it was my email client which was wrong, there are still posts to the mailing list that I simply do not receive. I see gaps in the replies. I rarely post to the mailing list anymore because it is not as friendly as it used to be.
Let me know if there is anything I can do to help debug this issue (email headers and what not). When in doubt, just mimic what the Apache mailing lists do.
I see this too. I'd go so far as to say the gmail is common enough that the software should do whatever it needs to do to support it well and I shouldn't have to do anything to gmail to make that work besides maybe putting a label on the conversations.
My pet peeve is that I still get emails from myself when I reply to issues. I've also started getting double emails when someone replies to me but I'm so used to the discourse being funky that I never thought to complain about it.
I like some things about discourse too - I like that fenced code blocks work pretty well. I'm used to markdown so I like that I can use it for links rather than click around in gmail. I like that i can reply using gmail when I don't want to jump over to the site and I like that I can jump over to the site when I want a live preview. I don't use the "forum" features really at all. Like you I really only use it as a fancy mailing list.
I am the opposite, I do not receive my own replies, but I wish I did. I
expect the thread to be at the top of my inbox if I just replied.
The forum is nice for some things. I rarely post images (if ever), but I
used the forum this time around to do so. That and I had no idea what the
proper email for the meta group was.
Since you do not have mailing list mode selected and instead watch categories you were affected by this bug:
A fix for it is deployed, what it meant is that in some cases we used to skip notification and only include them in the context section.
The example with "David Pilato" and "apanimesh" notifications appears to be due to "renaming" of the topic. I am not sure what the correct thing to do here, we don't want to hide the fact that the topic was renamed, we do ensure there are correct headers to tie everything together.
Recently we spent a very large amount of time building diagnostics around mail, I need some specific examples of posts you were not notified on to further investigate.
This is a tricky problem we discussed quite a bit, if you have mailing list mode enabled we "echo" which can be confusing. I think the correct behavior for mailing list mode (which @Ivan does not have enabled) is only to echo stuff that was created on the web and not echo stuff you created via email. I will look at changing this.
The double email thing should stop right now, we had a regression that got deployed here and since has been fixed.
Anyway, we have been spending a very large amount of time refining email support @nik9000 feel free to check out https://discuss.elastic.co/admin/email/received and the various tabs around mail that help debugging stuff.
We are totally open to making more tweaks so please reply with specific problem examples so we can continue refining this.
I suspect there isn't much you can do here because topics can't be renamed in mailing lists. I guess you could not allow people to rename topics but that doesn't feel right.
I'd prefer "don't echo stuff I made". I tend to jump to the web interface to make the post because I like the preview. I always forget stuff like "if I want to make "```" appear in the message, how do I escape it so it doesn't become a block quote. So preview is handy.
Cool! I'll try and actually report things like this when they come up rather than grumble to myself and ignore them.
I did not notice that David edited the title. In this case, creating a new
thread is the correct solution.
As soon as I find some more examples of dropped emails, I will updated this
topic. Hopefully the fix you mentioned will improve things.
"Since you do not have mailing list mode selected and instead watch
categories you were affected by this bug:"
What is mailing list mode? Should I have "Send me an email for every new
post (unless I mute the topic or category)" enabled and then explicitly
disable categories?
This is a bit more aggressive than watching a few categories, when you tick "Send me an email for every new post (unless I mute the topic or category)" in your user profile (aka. mailing list mode) we trigger a mode where you are flooded with emails for every new post regardless of category.
Leaving my settings for now so that I can help debug.
Every time I find a missing post, I see that the thread title was modified.
Minor changes that escape the eye. Perhaps there has never been an issue.
It is easier to spot problems when the first post is missing, but it is
easy to see why this case is the most prevalent: users will change a title
only once, usually right after creating a topic.
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