Rolling out email addresses for categories

While setting up guides, I had one of those moments and figured out how the email in system works (bonus points since it doesn’t cost us any more either).

Since this is the blocking feature of having feature parity with mailing lists, we should get this rolled out ASAP.

My plan is to create addresses for every main category and let the category owners know about this feature in the bug they filed for their category. They can then let us know if they’d prefer a different address and if they want addresses for sub-categories. I’ll also add the email to the ‘About’ post in the category so users can find the email.

Sound good to everyone or is there something I’ve missed? I’d like to roll this out on Tuesday or Wednesday otherwise I may not have time until next week.

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Will this come in a discourse+category_name@mozilla-community.org format?

No, those are reserved for reply keys.

They use ‘top level’ addresses (not sure of the exact term). A working example is meta@mozilla-community.org and that will post to meta. I’ve filed this bug with the proposed emails for current categories.

An added bonus of this is we can use any domain Community IT hosts email for (eg discourse@mozilla.org.uk could post to a UK community category)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1081725

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@yousef ~ let’s file a bug to track this change. I want to start doing changes with some notion of “change control” and approvals vs. discourse postings.

Also gives us opportunity to discuss the change and schedule a window with sufficient notification (important as the use of Discourse continues to grow).

I agree with that, just filed one.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1081738

Great.

I think we need some way to post a notice to Discourse users of pending maintenance work with a date & time and some text to explain what the change entails.

For all maintenance windows we make a thread and mark it as a banner topic, which adds a notice on user’s screens and stays until they dismiss it.

https://discourse.mozilla-community.org/t/updated-notice-site-maintenance-30-09-2014/816

An example, the OP shows on top of all pages.

How that prevents from random people posting spam?

Right now it will only make threads
from emails which have an account. We could make this a bit
stricter and have it only accept emails from trust level 1 users
but I think that’s a bit too much.

My main concern was email forgery, but I assume it’s the same with current mailing lists.

No idea if discourse implements a way to deal with spam messages.

Replying myself:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/some-ideas-for-spam-control/10393/4?u=nukeador