Discourse and incoming email

[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.

[eddowding]

I'd love to use the API but it's far from obvious if that's actually possible on Cloudron. @jenny_molloy's opening post suggests it's not.

https://meta.discourse.org/t/direct-delivery-incoming-email-for-self-hosted-sites/49487

@jdaviescoates

[girish]

POP3 is enabled in the next release. Though, I haven't tried if Discourse works well with that.

[nebulon]

To give an update on this. Currently the package lacks the pre-setup of the pop3 configs, this is under way, however even then I wasn't able to make use of that feature properly, despite the app receiving the emails. May just be that I haven't fully grasped how it is supposed to work.

[jdaviescoates]

@nebulon great that this is finally moving forward. IMHO it's really very important that we get this working as it's a core feature of Discourse.

Let me know if I can help testing

[nebulon]

For a start I have published a new app package which does the pre-setup of the email receiving part.

Just to be clear, the transactional emails for discourse are using a different email address.

So far I haven't been able to configure it to actually accept any emails for forum threads, however it does process it now, so maybe I am just missing something small.

[ntnsndr]

@jdaviescoates Me too!

[mononym]

Hello. I was thinking of setting up a Discourse forum especially because it can also be used as a mailing list – i.e. a reply by a user via email corresponds to a forum reply if I understood well. I don’t mind using a third party email account or the cloudron one.
But by reading this thread I can’t understand if the email integration for Discourse on Cloudron actually works. Is it only a specific or a general issue? I would be delighted if somebody could illuminate me about this. Thx!

[mononym]

@mononym to myself
It should work it seems : https://forum.cloudron.io/post/42987

[mononym]

Hello again @jdaviescoates & @nebulon.
Thanks for all the efforts for making this work !

I try to get my head around the functionality to reply by email and I think I'm missing something out there.

The POP3 settings are enabled in the Discourse instance. They correspond to the mailbox in the app's configuration panel (hosted on cloudron).

The mailinglist function works as far as it concerns sending an email to each user for each new topic creation. The second functionality would be to be able to reply to this topic by email. In order to do so, Discourse asks to activate the setting reply by email enabled in Settings/Email.

The following is where problems occur :
This setting only works if a reply by email address is defined. I used the provided template from Discourse %{reply_key}@reply.example.com with my domain. Each new topic corresponds to a reply_key which is the address a user has to send his answer to in order to comment on a topic.

Sending an email reply to let's say ui9cflk7c0obwgvouw0o@reply.example.com doesn't work. The mail cannot be delivered :
550 5.0.350 Remote server returned an error -> 550 No such address ...and how could it with an non-existing email address.

Is there any setting I'm missing in Discourse to get this work with a permanent email address ?

---

Update:
Following this thread, I added an alias to my cloudron mail address (and activated POP3). Besides forum@example.com I added the alias replies@example.com. In Discourse I add this email in Settings/Email pop3 polling username.

These settings break even the sending when new posts are made: 550 Authenticated user forum@example.com cannot send mail as replies+verp-9ab2aa4b4eae14ee9580a918df2cead7@example.com

[robi]

@mononym for that you need to turn on masquerading in the email config for that domain so forum@ can send email as replies@

[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.