Email interface complains about "message too short"

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

We’re sorry, but your email message to 
 (titled 
) didn’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 “+1”.

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 wĂŒrde das Problem genauso nicht dadurch gelöst, dass man alle Privatstraßen 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 wĂŒrden nicht zwischendurch eines benutzen.

Bye
Frederik

  • that’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 “Privatweg” aufstellt, heißt das noch lange nicht, dass das auch so ist.

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

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 haven’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 Übersetzungsbutton ?

@Wetterauer I suspect the message was detected as German language because there are more text in that language than in English, and that’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 couldn’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