Apologies to those who may have submitted posts via email in the past two weeks. Due to infrastructure changes at our email provider, easyDNS, mail hasn’t been coming into Discourse properly. They had to end-of-life their institutional spam filter and when they set up the new one, we fell through the cracks (we have a somewhat special setup there since I’ve known them forever).
Anyway, thanks to @Quantumpanda pinging me about mail not coming through, I did some testing, realized what was happening, and the easyDNS folks spun up a new spam filter for us, so mail is once again flowing.
Everything sent in the past few weeks is gone as far as I know, so if you submitted something important, you’ll want to repost that. Just make sure it’s still relevant—the discussion may have moved on.
Again, sorry about this! It’s yet another reason why you can’t always trust email to arrive. When in doubt, use the Web interface to Discourse, where you can see that what you’re doing is posting.
I learned a long time ago that most people simply ignore minor problems in software and never report them. This doesn’t help anybody, because if one person is having a problem, there’s probably others having the same problem. So I make a point of contacting people when something stops working, just to make sure they’re aware there’s an issue.
Yeah, I do that too, particularly when I have a contact. In fact, I just reported two Apple support pages with seemingly contradictory information (likely just due to one being older) to an old friend who I know can get the report to the right people.
I’d certainly use inbound posting if I were confident of the way the posts would be displayed, but I can’t seem to find information about the way Discourse processes and parses email. What does it want? HTML? Markdown? Traditional Usenet-style bottom-posted replies? Anyone know, or can point to some reference? Thanks.
The best place to look/ask about such things is Discourse Meta.
That said, my experience is that unless you’re posting plain text and not quoting original text, there’s no predicting what the eventual post will look like.
I don’t recommend email posts—it’s just safer/better to click the View Topic button in an email notification and reply on the site.
All right, thanks. It’s not usually a burden to use the site (or PWA). I’ll see if I can dig up the details when I get the time, but it’s not a big deal.
I have found Markdown to be the most consistent method, aside from plain text. And you have to strip out quotes from the message being replied to—they’re not accepted in email replies. Also no signatures.
I use email primarily because that’s where I prefer to do most of everything, and I don’t like having to open a web page just to read and respond to things I can get in email. If I find that I need fancy formatting (rare) or to quote a message, I’ll use the web site.
But I’m an old fart in Internet terms, and I prefer to do my communicating via email whenever possible, because I’ve been using it for over thirty years now and I find it convenient and comfortable. And I’m very glad that Adam has enabled this option for TidBITS-Talk.
Thanks for that! No, I’m totally with you here, am a total email nut myself. Maybe once I’ve moved all of my Discourse subscriptions (all of them in ML mode) over to my own domains and can be fairly confident email won’t be blackholed in either direction I’ll start relying on the feature a bit more. I too find my MUA a very comfortable place to blast through lots of information.