Be Communities provides a rich Web experience that gives members the opportunity to interact with other community members (including Bentley colleagues) through online forums, blogs, files/images galleries, and wikis. To increase participation and productivity in Be Communities, we have enabled notifications and forum posts to be delivered to community members via a Mail Gateway on the site. This gateway manages queuing and sending all emails from and to Be Communities, providing community members with the ability to reply to forum posts directly from your email program (all email interactions with forums are captured onsite as well).
To take advantage of this ability, simply sign-in, go to your Be Communities settings, select the E-MAIL tab, and enable the settings there, like this:
Then scroll down and click the Save pushbutton.
From then on, any post in a forum you are subscribed to or forum thread you started or replied to (with "EMAIL ME REPLIES TO THIS POST" enabled) will be sent to your email client. You will see a slight difference in the email messages coming in from forums and forum threads you are subscribed to... the difference being as in this screen shot.
When you receive one of these email messages, the poster’s screenname will be in the From field and the Reply To field will be the email address for the forum with the subdomain @communities.bentley.com. Replying to it in your email client will send that email reply to the thread the post came from. If you prefer to use the Web interface, you can still get to that via a link to the thread that is also included in the email message.
We will have a look at that (the very least, update the steps/instructions. Thanks for pointing that out.
The settings menu doesn't exist in the updated Be Communities 12-Oct-14. I have to click on my profile to see settings. In e-mail settings, there are only two options (Enable email contact and Enable HTML emails).
The work for this has now been completed.
Note that this ability needs to be enabled forum by forum, so we do plan to have this done in about a week from the time of this writing -- we just wanted to provide a head's up as this comes online.