When you post in a topic or subscribe to something, Discourse will send you a notification (a little bubble on your avatar), but can also send you an email. This allows you to reply via your email program to mimic mailing list like behavior.
First, click on your avatar and click on the gear, notice that this window is also a notification center from when people reply to you, or like one of your posts, or when you earn a badge:
When you click on the gear you’ll be taken to your preference page:
Click on the “Preferences” tab on the top right, and then click the email section:
Use the dropdown and checkboxes to select your preferences.
Do NOT click on mailing list mode, unless you want a mail for every single post on the site. You probably only want mails for things you care about, so after setting these to your preferences, you can then subscribe to categories and tags to get notifications for what you really care about: Subscribing to topics and tags
By default you’ll be subscribed to the “Activity summary.” That’s a weekly mail that is an autogenerated newsletter of the most popular topics on the site. It’s the perfect “casual mode” for if you want to keep track of what’s going on the site but don’t feel like watching a bunch of categories and topics.
Filtering
We use %{optional_re}[%{site_name}] %{optional_pm}%{topic_title} as the subject when generating a subject line for you.
This shows up as “[Discuss Kubernetes] And then the subject” in your mail client. And then “Re:[Discuss Kubernetes]” when there are replies. This should allow for normal threading in your client.
Each mail will have a header like this:
List-ID: Discuss Kubernetes | General Discussions <general-discussions.discuss.kubernetes.io>
You can use this header in your mail client to filter specific mails into whatever folders you want. Gmail (and possibly others) use this information to automatically generate “Filter messages from this list”