If you’ve configured your forum settings to send messages to you in email, you can reply to email and the reply will automatically get posted back to the forum – in other words, it will work just like the QNA email list in that regard. However, you cannot start a new topic from email – you have to go to the forum to start a new topic (i.e. ask a new question).
I did notice that if you reply to an email from the forum, you should not mess with the reply address in any way. That apparently confuses discourse and in that case your reply doesn’t get posted to the forum. I noticed that @jim replied to a private message I had sent him and added himself as a cc: on the reply – his reply did not get posted back to me (by chance I found it in an email log). So if you reply to a forum email, don’t modify the reply address at all, even to add a cc or forward.
I think the problem may have not been the cc: on the reply – it turns out that the reply came from an email address than was different than the one Jim had set up for his account here. I have changed the settings of the forum so that when that happens, the email will get rejected. So if you reply by email, make sure the reply is coming from the same email address that you used when you set up the forum account.
What I am seeing is that the email messages arrive in my Apple Mail but they are not appearing in a thread. Each person responding will have a thread composed of their additions to the thread but there will be multiple threads for a particular item with 1 thread for each person. Argh
I am trending towards just using the forum web interface, rather than email. I’ve even replied to one post using my iPhone – the mobile interface works well, at least on my 6 Plus’s big screen.
On my Mac, I made a standalone browser with Fluid, so that Discourse has a separate icon from all my other web pages. So I can quickly click on the icon in the dock to check the forum. However, Fluid doesn’t know anything about what is going on in Discourse, so there is no “badge” on the icon when there is new activity. I wish they did have wrapper apps for Mac and iOS like Slack does, mostly so it could have a badge and maybe notifications. It’s probably possible for a third party to do it since Discourse uses an open JSON based API, but I certainly don’t have the time to do that myself.
In general I am quite pleased with Discourse so far, but it certainly isn’t perfect.