Contributions to discussions by email

Absolutely agree! This has been talked about quite a lot already, so I would expect this to be slowly approaching us in the pipeline :)

Do we have to worry about the risk of fragmentation if people email in comments without reading the rest of the discussion?

I agree it would be nice.

I agree with @richarddbartlett. Maybe contribution by email should be allowed for the discussions in which you have chosen to get notifications about every new comment in discussion as suggested in https://www.loomio.org/discussions/4976 ?

HI all, has anyone looked into http://www.sencha.com/
for converting fm website to a webapp. I'm unsure if this is the place for discussing the app but I thought it would be useful while we're on it...

@richarddbartlett I don't think there is much risk of that as people would tend to check out a discussion first before replying, if they hadn't been following the discussion.

I was thinking about this feature last night and I'm super excited about it. Our discussion model with title and body maps to email subject and body very well.

I imagine that someone could email a bunch of people and include groupname@loomio.org to start a discussion.

When loomio gets the email addressed to groupname@loomio.org it creates a draft discussion thread with the email subject as the title and the email body as the first comment by the author.

After creating the (draft) discussion It also checks the email recipients for unrecognised members.

It then emails back to the sender with something like the following:

---

Loomio received an email from you starting a discussion in the Loomio Community group titled "Contributions to discussions by email"

Please confirm that you want to create this discussion by clicking this link: [confirm new discussion]

The following email addresses were included in the email but don't appear to belong to existing group members. To send group invitations to those addresses click invite next to their name:

• someone@gonnajoinloomiosoon.org [invite]

* mary@hadalittlelamb.tv [invite]

Whenever recipients reply to all, Loomio can append comments to that discussion thread simply following the common RE: discussion title format already in use in the email world. Loomio would email them to confirm that their email will be turned into a comment.

The confirmation thing might get annoying.. I imagine having to do it to authenticate the user really is the owner of the email. Note that I think we only need to confirm their intention when they reply to emails that did not come from loomio itself... when they reply to loomio generated notifications about new discussions or comments then we can include a unique token to ensure the authenticity of the author sending the email.

I really like this idea because it means you can basically start a loomio thread from your email client and invite all the recipients to you loomio group without ever having to leave your email client.

Finally.. there would be a bit of smarts in the email relay thing so that people included in the original email would not get the content twice.. only those group members who were not included in the recipients would get the new discussion/comment email.

I really gotta mock this up.

@robertguthrie I really like how you've developed this! This could become such a powerful feature. It will increase the virality of Loomio significantly. It also has potential to increase the impact of Loomio in changing the world. I'm so excited! Thanks Robert!

Their might be some useful thoughts here:
http://blog.trello.com/create-cards-via-email/