Email interface complains about "message too short"

Twice now I have received an email message from Discourse saying:

Weā€™re sorry, but your email message to ā€¦ (titled ā€¦) didnā€™t work.

To promote more in depth conversations, very short replies are not allowed. Can you please reply with at least 20 characters? Alternatively, you can like a post via email by replying with ā€œ+1ā€.

In one case, the full text of my email was:

Hallo,

On 22.09.22 13:28, Jonathan Haas via OpenStreetMap Community wrote:

Davon abgesehen wĆ¼rde das Problem genauso nicht dadurch gelƶst, dass man alle PrivatstraƟen wie oben vorgeschlagen mit access=destination versieht. Dann Routet der Router ja genauso da lang. Nur dass man in dem Fall keine Warnung kriegt. Also noch schlimmer.

Ich glaube, die guten Router erlauben ein access=destination nur am Start und Ziel der Route, und wĆ¼rden nicht zwischendurch eines benutzen.

Bye
Frederik

  • thatā€™s 142 characters of message text (not counting salutation, end greeting, and quote) I added. In the other case, it was

Hi,

On 9/20/22 19:11, Wetterauer via OpenStreetMap Community wrote:

Und wenn jemand ein Schild ā€œPrivatwegā€ aufstellt, heiƟt das noch lange nicht, dass das auch so ist.

Aber im allgemeinen glauben wir aufgestellten Schildern schon, ausser wenn sie sehr bastelig aussehen. Ich wĆ¼rde im allgemeinen davon ausgehen, dass jemand, der das Recht hat, Schilder aufzustellen, auch das Recht hat, den Zugang zu beschrƤnken.

Bye
Frederik

  • that was 248 characters of message.

Has this happened to other people using the email interface? I think the basic idea of rejecting less-than-20-character messages is good, but somehow the counting seems not to work properly. And I havenā€™t use any fancy forms of quoting, just what has been standard for the last decade.

Bye
Frederik

2 Likes

Warum sehe ich hier keinen Ɯbersetzungsbutton ?

@Wetterauer I suspect the message was detected as German language because there are more text in that language than in English, and thatā€™s why German UI is not showing the translate button.

@Firefishy this looks like what @woodpeck described is a bug when replying by email?

Yes, it appears the inbound email parse gets confused if the reply email starts with a quoted section. I looked around https://meta.discourse.org/ but couldnā€™t find a match for the issue. The error generated by discourse is Email::Receiver::TooShortPost

maybe instead of fixing it we could simply turn this filter off, as it clearly creates more problems as it solves

1 Like