Discourse and incoming email

[jdaviescoates]

@girish said in Discourse and incoming email:

I cannot think of a good solution immediately. But why exactly does discourse require POP3 over IMAP? Seems so strange, even really old things support IMAP these days, just very surprised.

Good question. And yes, it does seem odd, doesn't it!

[jimcavoli]

@girish There is pending IMAP support in https://github.com/discourse/discourse/pull/8301 which has been going through some back-and forth for review since November, but it's looking pretty positive as far as actual merge/release possibility in the next few months. If that happens, it's definitely the easiest option on the board.

[jenny_molloy]

Thanks for the advice! I managed to get inbound mail coming in now by setting up a subdomain and external POP mail box, which fixes an immediate problem regarding how we were planning to use the forum with specific category emails.

The main outstanding issue now with allowing incoming replies is that Cloudron outbound SMTP won't accept a "reply to" address that is a subdomain with plus addresses/VERPs (I guess both of these are separate issues).

I am trying Amazon SES as the SMTP server for the whole domain and will see if that solves the issue and report back.

Jenny

[girish]

@jenny_molloy For subdomain emails, simply add the subdomain itself as a domain in Cloudron. Then the mail server will started allowing that subdomain for outbound. You can even setup SES relay in mail -> domain -> SES.

[jenny_molloy]

Great - adding the subdomain in Cloudron and setting up Amazon SES login for that fixed the issue so I can now both send (via SES) and receive emails (via a Zoho pop mail box), including reply by email mode.
Thanks for your advice everyone!

[bmann]

I am in the same boat.

Discourse has IMAP support but only for group inboxes, not for "reply by email".

Discourse was one of the big apps I want to be running on Cloudron, and having to add an external email provider just for POP3 really sucks.

Discourse has their "mail receiver" docker container that runs all of this for you if you self install elsewhere, and works really well.

"Don't run Discourse on Cloudron" seems like a bad solution. Is this on a backlog somewhere to solve?

[jdaviescoates]

@bmann I hadn't realised "reply by email" doesn't work on Cloudron, but if that's the case then that is a rather major issue that really ought to have @staff attention imho. It's a core feature of Discourse that many people familiar with Discourse have come to expect.

I'm not sure, but I think it's basically the same/ a related issue @jimcavoli has been hitting when trying to package Loomio, see:

https://forum.cloudron.io/post/35429

[robi]

Does "reply-by-email" work for NodeBB?

[girish]

@bmann I guess https://github.com/discourse/mail-receiver is the repo? Did I understand correctly that it can be run on a separate server and hooked up to Cloudron+Discourse install? (Of course, ideally, we can have this all part of the Cloudron package itself or maybe a separate Cloudron package)

[eddowding]

Argh. Just gone through a lengthy process of getting Discourse set up - and it was a big part of choosing Cloudron - only to find this thread.

This is challenging, even though there is an answer.

1. Any solutions?
2. Does NodeBB do inbound? On Cloudron?
3. Can this be done with Mailgun instead?

[girish]

@eddowding nodebb doesn't do inbound afaik. Incidentally, I was looking into making our recvmail addon work. Let me look into if it's easy to enable POP3 at a mailbox level.

[eddowding]

@girish thanks - here's hoping.

Would this be a quick-to-deploy solution?

[jdaviescoates]

@eddowding said in Discourse and incoming email:

Can this be done with Mailgun instead?

I've not tried it yet, but I think there is a new option when installing apps to not use Cloudron for mail at all and to just configure it all within the app itself. I guess that might work @staff ?

[girish]

@jdaviescoates That feature is for used for configuring apps that send email. @eddowding wants a way for an app to receive email.

[girish]

@eddowding yes, it will be part of update (if we implement it). Just to double check, this feature only makes sense if your domain's email is also hosted on Cloudron. Is that the case with your setup?

[jdaviescoates]

@girish said in Discourse and incoming email:

@jdaviescoates That feature is for used for configuring apps that send email. @eddowding wants a way for an app to receive email.

I realised @eddowding wants to receive email (and I think it's really quite bad that Discourse is a Stable App but doesn't have some of it's basic features packaged, nor any warning of those missing features. Indeed when installing that app it says "Use it as a: mailing list" which you can't do if it can't receive mail), I just figured Mailgun details or whatever could be entered somewhere into Discourse settings and that might work. I guess you're saying that wouldn't work but I don't think I really understand why that would be the case

[girish]

@jdaviescoates It's debatable if mailing list is a basic feature for forum software (though it seems the description comes from https://github.com/discourse/discourse#readme and I am reluctant to remove it since this is what the upstream devs think )

That said, you can use it as a mailing list, just not if the email domain is hosted on Cloudron since we don't support POP3 yet. I also don't know why they only support POP3 when all other apps support IMAP (gitlab, freescout, espocrm for example). Anyone have any background on this?

[eddowding]

@girish Yep email is / can be hosted here too for this domain.

[eddowding]

@girish https://meta.discourse.org/t/configuring-reply-via-email/42026

[jdaviescoates]

@girish said in Discourse and incoming email:

I also don't know why they only support POP3

Yes, it does seem odd.

Although it sounds like it's not the only way:

Pushing emails via the Discourse API

Alternatively, you can push emails to Discourse via the API. For that, you will need

To check the manual_polling_enabled site setting.
A master API key 138 or an API key associated to a staff member.

Then, to push an email to Discourse, you need to pass the raw email content as the “email” parameter when POSTing to “/admin/email/handle_mail”. The endpoint accepts application/json (recommended), multipart/form-data, or application/x-www-urlencoded request bodies (with an appropriate request Content-Type header, naturally).

You’re done

From the link @eddowding posted above

Edit: also, this thread should not be marked as solved, as this issue has not yet been solved.