discourse reply by e-mail broken

Website
1

Currently cannot reply to Whonix forums posts by e-mail.

Trying to fix.

2

trying to fix still

3

testing it again

4

Itā€™s happening when accidentally sending from the wrong e-mail address.

5

There is already:
http://forums.dds6qkxpwdeubwucdiaord2xgbbeyds25rbsgr73tbfpqpt4a6vjwsyd.onion/t/discourse-reply-by-e-mail-broken/9650
but maybe itā€™s too old.
I explained this likely same broken issue here:
http://forums.dds6qkxpwdeubwucdiaord2xgbbeyds25rbsgr73tbfpqpt4a6vjwsyd.onion/t/on-virsh-whonix-external-failed-to-apply-firewall-rules/9613/6
and here:
http://forums.dds6qkxpwdeubwucdiaord2xgbbeyds25rbsgr73tbfpqpt4a6vjwsyd.onion/t/whonix-moving-from-github-to-gitlab/9676/5

In short: I sent mail, with a good mailer client, via Tor, and for, IIRC, two mails I even got a discourse reply to my mailbox, but not for one mail, but neither of the three mails got through to the topics, these two linked, that they were replies to.

6

Works for me. As the e-mail symbol illustrates, this reply was sent via
e-mail.

You need to reply from the exact e-mail address that you signed up with.
If you are using multiple e-mail addresses in Thunderbird (or perhaps
other e-mail clients), these are easily confused. Both, usability wise
[1] and due to e-mail program bugs [2].

[1] In Thunderbird, sending ā€œfromā€ an e-mail address doesnā€™t change the
SMTP server.

[2] Even when selecting the intended SMTP server, due to bugs which I
didnā€™t have time to investigate, Iā€™ve experienced mails sent through an
unintended SMTP server.

I donā€™t recommend using multiple e-mail addresses in the same e-mail
client unless no harm done if these get mingled.

Under this discourse forum user account settings
(/preferences/account) it is possible to add alternative e-mail
addresses. All e-mails coming from these addresses would then be
accepted for reply via e-mail.

7

Test reply.

8

Testing replying via e-mail to forums.

Letā€™s see if this works.

9

Test reply.
Test reply.
Test reply.
Test reply.
Test reply.

10

Test reply.
Test reply.
Test reply.
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11

Test reply.
Test reply.
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Test reply.

1 Like
12

Is it possibly to reply by mail with pgp signed message?
I couldnā€™t make it work (mail sent today 08 Nov).

I replied by mail to grass presentation - #5 by h3xagonal with contents ā€œTest signed message by mail.ā€, sent to Whonix Forum discoursereplies+5d0c914d70dcc4af8fda7beef221296d@whonix.org, but the mail didnā€™t appear on the thread, although for other replies I made by mail to other threads (unsigned), the replied appeared.
Maybe there is a filter?

Can you check on the mail server what happened to the message? I retried already a second time.

13

Your e-mail:

Test signed message by mail.

result:

RateLimiter::LimitExceeded

E-mailā€¦

ā€¦ was received by discourse with PGP signature intact but it seems discourse is stripping the signatures before presenting the message in the forums and/or ignoring it. In other words, I doubt that discourse upstream has any sort of PGP signatures support. You could try to search meta.discourse.org and/or post a feature request upstream.

14

Your e-mail:

Test signed message by mail.

result:

 RateLimiter::LimitExceeded

What is RateLimiter::LimitExceeded for incoming email? - support - Discourse Meta

E-mailā€¦

grass presentation - #7 by grass

ā€¦ was received by discourse with PGP signature intact but it seems discourse is stripping the signatures before presenting the message in the forums and/or ignoring it. In other words, I doubt that discourse upstream has any sort of PGP signatures support. You could try to search meta.discourse.org and/or post a feature request upstream.

ā€œThe issue is that we poll emails every 5 minutes or so and then create
posts in batch, thus hitting the rate limits. The solution is
unfortunately not easyā€

The problem I that I donā€™t receive a reply mail stating that the message
was rate limited, messages can fall in the limbo because of that. Also,
can you check if you server is retrying to send rate limited messages?

Also, even if you enabled discourse attachments, it will be stripped

I donā€™t know why stripping PGP signatures is a good idea.

1 Like
15

How to do that?

Asking ā€œwhyā€ might imply ā€œplease fix thatā€ but isnā€™t necessarily understood that way.

Git allows to sign git commit and then git web services such as github show the signature status on the web interface. Thatā€™s quiet neat. Perhaps it would be worth requesting a similar feature from upstream discourse.