Create new email address on forum domain

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#1

I have my forum nzarchitecture.net.nz set up on Digital Ocean, and am using Mailgun for user notification emails from the forum. Mails are send from address ‘noreply@nzarchitecture.net.nz’

I want to create a new usable email address on the forum domain; ‘invitations@nzarchitecture.net.nz’, that I can use from MS Outlook, but for the life of me I can’t figure out how to do this.

Unfortunately I have forgotten now, but am assuming the ‘noreply@nzarchitecture.net.nz’ email address used was created by the Discourse setup wizard? I know the DNS records for the domain are on DigitalOcean, but DO doesn’t seem to have any specific email account configuration options.

By way of background, I want to use this address to invite potential users to visit the forum, utilising the Mailgun group email feature, which requires a valid alias email address on the domain for sending to bulk nominated recipients.

The built-in Discourse bulk invite tool doesn’t seem to accommodate custom messages, nor the passing on of invitations to others by recipients themselves, otherwise I would just use that.

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#2

When you set up Mailgun you have to add some DNS records so that it can send authenticated emails from your domain, but it doesn’t actually set up any email accounts. noreply@nzarchitecture.net.nz doesn’t really exist, so there should be no problem with you also setting up other email accounts.

If you want to set up reply via email, then you might need to look at using a subdomain.

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#3

Hi, thanks for your reply.

How do I set up those other accounts? If I simply nominate ‘invitations@nzarchitecture.net.nz’ as the email alias for my invitation group in Mailgun settings, any message to that address just bounces, with a response from either Discourse or Mailgun (I assume) ‘Unknown To: address’

I have forum reply-by-email working well, luckily, even without subdomain.

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#4

I thought you meant setting up separate email accounts through your hosting/Cpanel, that kind of thing.

Do you want to be able to log in to invitations@nzarchitecture.net.nz in Outlook? Then that needs to be handled entirely outside of Discourse. And if you handle reply-by-email through the mail receiver rather than POP it’s probably not possible.

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#5

I do use email receiver. So does that mean there is no way to have any other email addresses on the domain? I only need to send, not receive using this address…

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#6

What address do you use for mail-receiver?

If it’s an alias on your root domain then no, this won’t work as-is. Email is received via a DNS “MX” or mail exchanger record. If you have nominated the root domain as your mail-receiver mail exchanger, then you cannot nominate a second system without either changing the mail receiver domain.

Does it matter which address you are sending the invitations as though?

Alternatively you can send email direct from Discourse. You won’t be able to use Outlook but it also won’t require any additional configuration.

You could conceivably bodge something together to let you do this with new SPF and DKIM, but how would you know if invitees are having problems?

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#7

Hi, I have replies+%{reply_key}@nzarchitecture.net.nz as the receiver address (I am guessing - at least that is the address that members can reply by email to)

It probably doesn’t matter what address I send invitations as though - though would be nice if it was not confusing to recipients…

How do I alternatively send a bulk custom email from discourse, from addresses in a csv list? Is only way to bodge around with bulk invitation template?

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#8

The only way I’m aware of to send emails from discourse is using PMs.

You may be able to combine it with discourse-bcc, but AFAIK you won’t be able to customize it much without impacting all PM emails.

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