How a reply gets from an inbox to the community
Jetonomy sends a notification email when a new reply or mention lands. That email carries a “Reply to this post” call to action with a reply-to address that is unique to the member and the topic. The member replies to it the way they reply to any email.
Their provider delivers the inbound message to the endpoint you configured. Jetonomy parses it, strips the quoted history and signature, keeps the new text, and creates a community reply attributed to that member. From the member’s side there was one action: type and Send. No browser, no login, no hunting for the thread.
Parsing that keeps the reply clean
Raw email is messy, so Jetonomy is strict about what it keeps. It removes lines that begin with the standard quote marker, prefers the plain text part of the message, and falls back to stripped HTML only when there is no plain text. Line breaks are preserved and plain links become Markdown links, so the reply reads like it was written in the composer.
You control the edge cases from settings. A minimum reply length catches accidental one-word sends, a maximum length truncates runaway threads, and signature stripping removes common separators such as “Sent from my iPhone”. Whatever survives parsing goes through the same wp_kses_post sanitization every other reply passes, so email is not a way around your content rules.
Safe by design
Open inbound email is an obvious target, so the address itself is the security boundary. Every reply-to address contains a signed token tied to one WordPress user and one topic. Jetonomy checks that token before it writes anything, so an attacker who sees or guesses an address still cannot post as another member, because the token is bound to the real user ID. Tokens expire after 30 days, so an old notification cannot be replied to indefinitely.
Setup is a one-time job: copy the inbound endpoint URL from settings, point your provider’s inbound parsing at it, enter your reply domain, and use the built-in test to send yourself a sample notification and confirm the parsed result.