Discourse will not accept forwarded email but successfully sends and an error message to the original sender?

[exlabs (Daniel)]

Hello everyone,

I am using the “Configure incoming email to create new topics” feature.

The workflow is like this:

1. User sends email to “support@mycompany.com”
2. Microsoft 365 forwards this email to “mycompany-category-1@discoursemail.com”
3. New topic should appear.

But I am getting the error message of a REJECTED email in Discourse,

I think Microsoft 365 is not including all the information that Discourse needs in the header.

I trialed this using my personal email (Gmail) when it forwarded to discourse it worked first time! This seems something related to Microsoft 365.

The odd thing, the original sender does get an email from discourse notifying them of the error! So discourse does know who the original sender is.

I really do not know how to go forward with solving this issues, can anyone help?

[supermathie (Michael Brown)]

@exlabs

• User sends email to “support@mycompany.com”

Is support@mycompany.com configured in Discourse to accept mail, e.g. as a group inbox address or category address?

That part is crucial - Discourse does not see the SMTP envelope, only the mail itself. A blind forward to mycompany-category-1@discoursemail.com won’t be visible to Discourse.

[exlabs (Daniel)]

Hi Michael,

Thanks for much the knowledgeable reply, I was worried that not too many people use this feature and I might just get tumbleweed.

It is using the category address only. We have a private category called “Support” and in the category settings it is configured like this,

[supermathie (Michael Brown)]

Ok, that will only work if people are addressing (in to/cc) that address.

You need only add support@mycompany.com to “Custom incoming email address” and it should work.

[exlabs (Daniel)]

The odd thing, I setup a Gmail account to forward to company-support-12@discoursemail.com and that worked! But changing over to our actual Microsoft 365 support email managed to break things, so I assumed the error was with Microsoft.

OK, I have added this to the box,

`mycompany+support-12@discoursemail.com|support@mycompany.com

I will active email forwarding, send a test email and see…

Will report back.

[exlabs (Daniel)]

OK, adding our support email to the box fixed it! Thanks

However, when I reply from Discourse, is seems it never generates a reply email. I have checked in admin/email/sent and there is no record of Discourse doing anything. I have waited 10 minutes for it to arrive and nothing yet.

The reply email is sent after about 15 minutes when I reply using Discourse. Great it is working! Thanks

[supermathie (Michael Brown)]

@exlabs

a Gmail account to forward

It was probably doing a “forward as attachment” rather than a blind forward.

@exlabs

The reply email is sent after about 15 minutes

You can adjust this to your liking by looking for the email time window site settings.

[exlabs (Daniel)]

@supermathie

email time window

Thanks so much for all the help! This made my day.