Constraints on "Custom incoming email address" (for hosted sites only, maybe?)

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Hello Discourse Community —

The following is something that I’ve observed through trial and error, but haven’t seen documentation for nor encountered a warning or error for.

On our site, which is hosted by Discourse (for which we’re very appreciative!), setting a Custom incoming email address for a category only seems to work if the email address is prefixed by “foo+{something}@discoursemail.com” (where ‘foo’ is the general slug for our site).

Specifically, I often set up a new category, set up what I consider to be an intuitive email address for it, send a test mail to that address, and never get a bounce (correction: I did eventually get one several hours later) nor see it show up in our site’s received or rejected email logs. Then I eventually remember my previous experiences, set the address to foo+<some name>, run another test and it immediately works.

If I’m not imagining it, this seems understandable as a means for Discourse to distinguish mails intended for one hosted site from another, but I wanted to check that I’m correct. Or, if I’m not, see whether there are other explanations for why my initial choices of email address seem to go to /dev/null.

Thanks!
-Brad

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It may seem simple/reductive to state out loud, but the custom email address only works if it actually gets delivered to the site.

So you can’t just put anything there, the address must get delivered to the site for it to stand a chance of working.

There’s no way for Discourse to do any verification of that address to ensure that happens, so the onus is on the admin to ensure that happens.

On our hosting I recommend leveraging a few addresses that we’ve prearranged to get delivered to your site:

  • {ANYTHING}@{YOUR PREFIX}.discoursemail.com
  • {ANYTHING}@{your.site.hostname}
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Thanks @supermathie —

For our (hosted) site, I didn’t realize that …@{OUR PREFIX}.discoursemail.com was an option and have only ever tried using …@discoursemail.com as the hostname because that’s what the default “accept incoming emails” address uses (and I’ve updated my original query above to try and clarify this since I left the hostname off in the original question). I’ll give that a try, thanks for the tip!

Though I understand that Discourse can’t verify email addresses for self-hosted instances of Discourse, would it be possible to have the hosted instances generate a warning or error if the email address was not of an expected format? (or an expected format when using a …discoursemail.com address?

Thanks again,
-Brad

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There is no bound to the “expected format” other than “valid email address”, so this isn’t feasible.

This might be something we could do.

2 Likes
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Thanks again for the response!

I think you’ve confirmed my suspicion that this is an issue specific to hosted Discourse sites like ours. I don’t know what level of effort would be required to have such sites verify that the …discoursemail.com addresses entered in this field are valid, but such a feature would’ve saved me a fair amount of time and frustration over the past several years of setting up new mailing lists and aliases, wondering why they don’t work. I imagine it would help others as well.

Alternatively, even a little tool tip on that field for a hosted site indicating that a legal address must be slug+...@discoursemail.com or ...@slug.discoursemail.com would go a long way. Though I don’t know whether making that tip specific to hosted Discourse sites makes that approach unworkable.

-Brad