Overview

Allow readers who subscribe to a blog via email to reply directly to an email they receive.

Background

A minimally-viable commenting system.

Design

Requirement: this is an opt-in feature to enable replies via email.

Goal: ideally, we'd provide a proxy / relay email address (e.g. matt@writeasletters.com or matt+secret-subscriber-token@writeasletters.com) that would keep the author's true email address private.

We then have two options, depending on how much privacy correspondents need / abuse we anticipate:

High privacy:

The author could then reply to a proxy / relay address (e.g. secret-subscriber-token@reply.writeasletters.com), which would forward to the original commenter's true email address. Both parties would have their real email address hidden.

Lower privacy:

The author can reply directly to the commenter. (Note: This probably makes the most sense. We mostly want to protect the author from unwanted abuse; but if they reply, they're choosing to engage, and we can assume all is good.)

Implementation

• Add a new option when enabling email subscribers: Enable replies via email
  • Include help documentation / tutorials on this
• When enabled, include a Reply-To header, pointing to a special email address that is connected to the individual subscriber
  • This enables potentially invalidating the email address via Write.as platform for abusive subscribers (in the future)
• The special email address should:
  • Receive replies
  • Validate the address, check against anti-abuse lists (future)
  • Send the message to the email address on the post author's account, with Reply-To set to the commenter's actual email address