The marquee feature of Commons 1.4 is the awesome BuddyPress functionality developed by the Commons Dev Team that lets members respond to email notifications directly from their inboxes.

If you wanted to respond to a discussion forum post before Commons 1.4, you’d need to click on the hyperlink in an email notification, log into the Commons, and post your response directly to the thread through the website.

No more!

Now, you can simply click Reply in your email client; Reply By Email takes care of the rest!

 A Few “Reply By Email” Notes

• When you receive a Commons email notification, you’ll notice the phrase  “— Reply ABOVE THIS LINE to add a comment —” (circled in red, above).  Anything you type above this line will be part of the message posted to the forum, while everything below this line will be ignored  But it is vital that the line itself be present in the reply.  Reply By Email uses this info to route your reply back to the Commons.  (Depending on your email client, when you hit reply, you might see additional address information added.  Don’t worry – this will not be part of your response.)

•  You must reply using the same email address at which you received the notification – Reply By Email uses this as a way of matching you up with your Commons username. (Not an issue for most people, but it may affect those who have set up their email client with multiple email addresses.)

• You can use Reply by Email to reply to discussion threads on group forums, to personal messages and @mentions, and to group announcements.

• You cannot use Reply by Email to reply to notification “digests,” Docs notifications (new docs, edited docs, new comments), group file uploads, group invites, or friendship requests.

The Reply by Email plugin was developed for the Commons, and made available to the entire BuddyPress community. See here for technical details.