Redmine

Hi!

I've only been working with Redmine modestly for the last year or so, so my apologies in advance if this feature already exists.

In my collaborations, I make good use of Redmine's email interface to the Forums module. This enables me to capture email conversations among collaborators, even if the do not use my Redmine site. At a later time I can re-organize the forums and put conversations in their best context and order, which is often not known until after the work is mostly done, especially in scientific research settings.

However, I find that a good number of emails get capture of the nature "When are you available?", "When can we meet?", "When would be a good time to Skype?", and so forth. I consider such messages "out-of-band", and they can certainly clutter up any given Forum topic with even a small number of users using the email-forum gateway / interface.

Thus, I think a helpful feature would be to add a way for users to mark their email reply to a forum message as out-of-band, perhaps by either adding a key word or string ("tag") to the email subject line or somewhere in the email body. A reply so marked would still be sent to all the watchers watching the given forum topic, but the messages --- and all subsequent replies to it --- would NOT be added to the Redmine tables that store the Forum data, at least until some subsequent replier removed the special tag, at which point forum email replies would resume being added to the forums database.

I suspect I could probably write a simple plugin to add this functionality, but I'll be swamped for the next half year on dissertation work. Moreover, I think this feature is rather fundamental and as such ought be a core feature rather than a plugin (although perhaps such functionality could start that way). If an experienced plugin author could give me occasional guidance, I probably could implement such functionality in the near future (I'm an very experienced software engineer), but without such guidance it will likely be a while before I can make the attempt on my own.

Thanks!
Doug