Enable sending external emails to admin/moderator groups

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Nesha proposes a feature to enable sending external emails directly to pre-defined admin or moderator groups within Discourse. Currently, the recommended workaround involves creating a duplicate group (e.g., admin_messaging), configuring it to accept incoming emails, and forwarding messages from an external mailbox to this group. Nesha argues this is inefficient because it forces administrators to monitor additional mailboxes, increasing the risk that urgent messages from users unable to log in or suspended users are overlooked. The goal is to allow external contact via a branded email displayed on login or suspension dialogs, ensuring critical communication reaches the main admin group without extra steps. nathank notes that this functionality can currently be achieved via the Rails console by following a specific guide, but agrees that making it a core feature would be highly beneficial for administrators who do not have console access.

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Enable external email to be sent to pre-defined admin/moderator groups.

There is a recommended workaround to send external emails to admins/moderators:

  • Create groups admin_messaging, with the same list of users as in the group admin (yes, double administration here!)
  • Configure this group to accept incoming emails
  • Create external mailbox/use external mail system to forward emails to the configured group email address

However, this still presents admins/moderators with additional mailboxes to monitor.

Rationale:
If user/new user cannot login into our gated Discourse platform, they need a means to contact site admins. We want to display external admin email on different dialogs (when user cannot login, or is suspended, etc.). That is the only means for users in trouble to contact site admins from the outside world. We estimate this to be a seldom occurrence. However, the attention of admins would be focused on the messages in admins group, so they might overlook these messages in admins_mesaging that are in fact a bit urgent.

Considering we have setup external shared mailbox with our branding and forwarding to admins_messaging, we can use that external mailbox to somehow alert admins, but this is a solution outside of Discourse platform and it is not exactly elegant…

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This can be achieved via the rails console:

But I think it would be a useful feature to have in core for those who can’t access the console.