Discourse and incoming email

[eddowding]

I'm finding Cloudron increasingly frustrating since it's unable to do many of the things that I want it to do.

There are 6 ways to host code and 2 ways to monitor uptime, but not much for communities.

Is it so hard to make Discourse work as it's supposed to?
Or to have a way to easily spin up docker images?

This issue has been open for two years. Suggestions that people could offer bounties have been rejected; going open source has been rejected.. should I just give up on there being a solution to this?

[girish]

@eddowding are you referring to installing/running discourse? Or incoming email configuration ? The former should work just fine. The latter was already implemented a while ago - https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/discourse/#incoming-email-setup . I am not sure why this thread remains unsolved but as a heads up, using a forum software as an email list ... has it's issues. From what I remember of testing this feature, discourse has lots of strange and edge case behavior when processing emails (like if you remove email body when replying, it may not do what you expect etc).

Would help to have more details about what problem(s) you are facing.

[eddowding]

@girish Ah in that case I take it back! (Well, some of it .. I still have concerns re software mix, but ... )

I've now got inbound email setup, but it doesn't seem allow catch-alls (even though the setting is set on cloudron) so each category email needs to be set up as an alias.

I also had to enable masquerading in cloudron email settings, which is probably worth mentioning in the setup docs.

[eddowding]

@girish can you please confirm that each category needs its own email set up?

[girish]

@eddowding TBH, I don't really know. Does discourse have any docs on this?

[bmann]

I'm about to test this again. There is still misunderstanding about this use case. I'll report back, including better documentation and screenshots -- e.g. "category mirrors mailing list" is not what this is about. You can choose to receive email for posts, and then reply by email.

Discourse ships with an email receiver docker image that uses callbacks, doesn't have to use POP3. Setting this up on other hosting, both Discourse and the mail receiver run on one server, and then transactional emails get taken care of usually by Mailgun or similar.

Appreciate the work that's been done in the meantime. The cost of Discourse hosting elsewhere, with Mailgun used for email, basically makes cloudron pay for itself, since the first paid tier of Mailgun is $35USD/month.

[eddowding]

FWIW I did get this worked out in the end so it is possible. I'll try to return here later to update with screenshots etc.

[bmann]

Yep, I had no problems with this -- once I figured out enabling POP3

• set up forum@yourdiscoursedomain.com as a mailbox
• enable pop3
• set the app as the owner of this mailbox

Want unique addresses for categories? Set up aliases for forum@yourdiscoursedomain.com like myothercategory@yourdiscoursedomain.com

In Discourse, you'll need to enable email in

For initial Discourse setup, I also have better instructions:

Rather than resetting the email address, you can / should reset the password -- which you need to do right away. Run the rake admin:create task from the Terminal for the root / admin account.

Hit "Y" to reset password and change the password.

The account already is an admin, and I didn't bother changing the email because I really only see it as a backup account.

Once I logged in with OIDC with my Cloudron account, I followed this same process to make my account an admin account -- same rake admin:create command, say "Y" to making it an Admin, but don't change password.

I don't know how to contribute better setup instructions -- are they in git so I can send a PR?

[girish]

@bmann you can submit PRs here - https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/docs/

Discourse docs are at https://git.cloudron.io/cloudron/docs/-/blob/master/knowledgebase/docs/apps/discourse.md?ref_type=heads

[jdaviescoates]

@bmann thanks for your input on this, very helpful! I think I'm correct that you never got around to submitting a PR to improve the docs around this?

[bmann]

I did not, unlikely to get to it, sorry.

[james]

@bmann I will take care of this and make sure your advanced guide will be added to https://docs.cloudron.io/apps/discourse/#incoming-email-setup

Thanks for the already done write-up!