Can DISCOURSE_NOTIFICATION_EMAIL be set to anything or does it need to be a real address?

I definitely do not have the big picture about how discourse interacts with email, so this might come across as a silly question.

I am self-hosting discourse.mydomain.com and using SendGrid for email, and everything is working.

In my app.yaml I set,

DISCOURSE_NOTIFICATION_EMAIL: real_address@mydomain.com

Can this setting be anything, is it purely cosmetic? I mean, could I change it to an email that does not exist noreply@discourse.mydomain.com? Or does this email actually need an inbox, etc?

Regards,

Daniel

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Hi Daniel :wave:

you’d be glad to know it doesn’t the forum sends transactional emails by SMTP, so you need to log in to the SendGrid. Discourse can use any address in your subdomain.

Your telling discourse in the setting on the container you want discourse to always sent it’s transactional emails as noreply@ - account activation, email notifications, password reset emails, etc.

If i remember right, when i installed last year i needed to remove speech-marks in a key/password/address in the container. I wish i recorded exactly where, and the intresting errors i got before.

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If you have discourse setup and running, and decide you want to receive email on discourse, you’ll need to get an api from SendGrid. However, i got my api from MailGun.

This api means there’s never really any inboxes. Mod/Admin can set any inbound email address for a group/category, given that the address domain matches what the trans email provider allows.

Through the api, the System can take steps to ensure that email is delivered to a topic. If this fails internally, the email trace stays on the admin panel logs. Oftentimes, if System cannot create staged user for inbound email, the mail provider of the sender will send an Undeliverable - with text including “do you have an account here?”. This is what i’ve experienced.

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Thanks for explaining that so well!

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