Reply by email issues

[mark]

I wanted to report a few things. I was experimenting with the "Email this post to…" feature, emailing some posts to another email address of mine. That worked fine. However,

* When I tried to reply via email (with a Gmail account), it didn't work unless I was registered (but it still told me I could do it, without having registered). Would it be possible to make it so it says you need to register before you can reply via email? (Or just not mention the replying via email unless you're registered.)
* If I was registered, the reply worked. However, if I didn't remove the quoted material, it would show up on the forum, which seems undesirable, since it has a subscription link and all. Would it be possible to clip the auto-quoted material out, for security reasons (and also to keep things clean on the forum)? I didn't actually try pressing the subscription link, nor am Is sure what would happen if I did, but it makes me nervous (and would probably make others nervous, too).

[GregChapman]

Hi Mark,

mark wrote

* When I tried to reply via email (with a Gmail account), it didn't work unless I was registered (but it still told me I could do it, without having registered). Would it be possible to make it so it says you need to register before you can reply via email? (Or just not mention the replying via email unless you're registered.)

This is one of the problems with Nabble's attempt to back two horses at once - forum users and mail list users. I describe the issues at:
http://greghelp.991552.n3.nabble.com/Is-Nabble-A-Mailing-List-or-Forum-td4012786.html
It's down the the forum administrator to edit the NAML code of their forum in order to cope with some of these problems. In your example the simplest way would be to edit the email footer that is appended to any email to point out the conditions under which email responses will work. This won't necessarily be a matter of whether the a user is registered but will be determined by the groups to which the individual user is assigned and the permissions they have for any particular sub-forum to which they may have the "View" permission but not a "Reply" permission.

* If I was registered, the reply worked. However, if I didn't remove the quoted material, it would show up on the forum, which seems undesirable, since it has a subscription link and all. Would it be possible to clip the auto-quoted material out, for security reasons (and also to keep things clean on the forum)? I didn't actually try pressing the subscription link, nor am Is sure what would happen if I did, but it makes me nervous (and would probably make others nervous, too).

This is part of the same issue of whether you consider your Nabble app a forum or a mail list and all users need to have the same perception.

It is totally legitimate to include the full text or an email sent in a mail list archive, but not if it is considered a forum. (The views people use when reading an archive are critical to usability too. "Threaded" can be more useful than "Classic" useful when the majority of users treat the app as a mail list.)

Again, you will need to edit the NAML to achieve your objective, but the code will be exceptionally complex if any of your users use inserted responses (as I am doing here) rather than top-posting replies.

There's another issue that that may not have occurred to you as a Gmail user but annoyed me intensely concerning Nabble. Nabble's assumption is that everyone uses Gmail or other platforms that arrange their mail in "conversations" rather than an InBox/Sent split. I set out the problem and a solution at:
http://greghelp.991552.n3.nabble.com/Your-Posts-To-A-Nabble-Mail-List-Are-Missing-td4012805.html