The Discourse forum framework used by Arduino Forum has support for making posts by replying to email notifications for activity in watched forum topics.
Although I am a big fan of email in general, and like the general idea of interacting with the forum via email, I have noticed that the use of the forum's feature by newcomers regularly results in less than ideal outcomes for them, the forum helpers, and the forum maintainers:
- The user does not have access to the formatting and preview features of the forum post composer and so may make poorly formatted posts
- The user may not have a good picture of the full context of the forum thread they are contributing to
- The user may not realize their reply is being published, rather than being a private email conversation with the person they are responding to
- Automatically added email signatures clutter the post, may be interpreted as spam, and generate flags from those who erroneously believe we have a rule against users posting their email address
For this reason, I have disabled the reply by email feature.
I delayed this action for some time because I thought that some users might end up relying on this feature to continue participating in the forum after compatibility with some obsolete browser versions was lost (see: Browser incompatibility). However, I performed a survey of the usage of the feature by established forum members (those with trust level of "Member" or higher), and found only 24 uses over the last two months. The majority of that usage was by @tigger, who also made far more posts via the forum's web interface, and so hopefully won't be inconvenienced by this change too much.