I only just signed up for the forums in “mailing list” mode. Kudos for at least supporting it, but it’s kind of awful.
It’s completely unclear how to send a message ot one of the lists. I don’t want to have to visit a web page to say something.
Instead of just sending plain text whenever reasonable and having reasonable From: lines, every mesage comes from “swift@discoursemail.com” and contains a ton of things like huge footers with the message to which the new one is in reply (but not formatted like email, so mail clients can’t elide it), user icons, and all sorts of extraneous crap.
Mailing lists have worked great for decades for managing the evolution of very complex projects. If Discourse is going to be an adequate replacement for them it needs to actually work like they do when it claims to support a "mailing list” mode, not just gateway a web page to email.
untick: "Include an excerpt of replied to post in emails"
Regarding how to automatically categorize stuff you will need to discuss with @forum_admins
We support incoming emails per category so each category can have a distinct mail address.
Regarding HTML formatting of mails, we always include text so perhaps you want your mail client to default to that?
Regarding email address exposure, as it stands Discourse specifically tries to protect email addresses for all users on the forum, if we wanted to give people unique addresses we would have to fake a "swift+some-user@discourse.org" address, its something we do think about.
@eschaton the email address to use for sending emails to each category is listed in the "about" for each category. Also listed on the swift.org forums section.
Ah. Ok, well except for that category -- I assumed people commenting about the forums would actually be on the forum website. There's also no incoming email address for the categories that don't allow general posting (ie. the Announcements categories).