I’d like to start investigating new post by email and am trying to configure things to check an email inbox we maintain elsewhere. I’ve got incoming (email_in) and the associated config lited in Start a New Topic via Email ✉ configured and am looking at the category configuration on the category I want these emails to arrive in. I can set the “Custom incoming email address” setting, but I don’t see where I would configure pop3 polling for that mailbox - everything I can find about setting up polling has to do only with self-hosted account and not discourse.org accounts.
Does this mean that custom pop3 accounts aren’t available for discourse.org sites and that I just need to forward email to the discourse-generated incoming email address? Or am I totally missing some step in the documentation somewhere?
Yes, to configure an alternative incoming email address on a hosted site, add a forwarding address on your email client to the category’s incoming email address.
Ok, great, thanks! So does that make the fact that the “Custom incoming email address” field shows up in discourse.org-hosted sites’ Category Admin page a bug?
Nope, it is not a bug. You would need to include the email address that is forwarding to your instance in that field for incoming email to work. On our hosted sites, there are 2 ways to configure incoming email:
1. Use default plus addressing for your site name
Say your site name is example. On your site you have a foo category. Users can email you at example+foo@discoursemail.com, assuming you enable email in in site settings and check off the Accept incoming emails sent to: example+foo@discoursemail.com box in category settings.
1.5. Use custom plus addressing for your site name
SImilar to example 1, you can enter a custom plus address for a category using the Custom incoming email address field. So instead of users emailing example+foo@discoursemail.com you could configure example+bar@discoursemail.com
2. Configure email forwarding
The alternate option is to configure an external inbox which forwards to your site. Say you have support@example.com. You could configure that inbox to forward mail to example+support@discoursemail.com, so that emails are posted to your support category. However, since the emails are sent to support@example.com, you need to include that as a custom incoming email address, in addition to checking off the accept incoming emails sent to... box.
So I don’t have the forwarding address configured with the address that’s forwarding the emails. However it seems to be working fine.
For my purposes at the moment I’m all set since it appears to be working (and thanks for your help!) but if you want more details I’m happy to provide more information.
From your screenshot that looks like option 1. You’re using the discoursemail.com domain with plus addressing. Unless you want users to email hyperweb+something-other-than-staff-inbox@discoursemail.com, or setup an inbox on your domain instead of discoursemail.com no need to modify the custom incoming email address field.
