Email to Message Inbox?

Product Support

AI-generated summary

The discussion is about whether it’s possible to configure Discourse to send emails from a custom address to a user’s message inbox. Stephen states that this is not possible for individual users, but pfaffman points out that support@discourse.org is an exception.

However, tanius suggests a workaround using groups. By enabling the “email in” setting and creating a group with a custom incoming email address, it’s possible to receive emails in a group inbox. This can be used to send emails to a user’s message inbox by creating a group with only one member.

Nesha also shares a technique using a custom email address with a group name, but notes that this doesn’t work with existing admin or moderator groups. They ask if it’s possible to redirect or forward received messages from a created group to an existing group, such as admins or moderators.

1

Is it possible to configure Discourse so that I have an email address @ my Discourse domain which goes to my message inbox on Discourse?

2

Groups can be assigned email addresses to start new conversations, but not users. Discourse isn’t a replacement for a conventional mail server/client.

3

That’s sort of true, but support@discourse.org gets delivered to a group.

4

Sure, but discourse.org is hosted at Google, not Meta. I’ve never had cause to email it, but it’s either a group which distributes mail to users, a mailbox which is accessed by multiple users, or an alias to a mailbox which is delivered by pop3 to a Discourse category or group inbox, right?

@rkaplan is asking for an email address at his discourse domain which goes to his mailbox. User mailboxes don’t support mail aliases, which is why I said that groups could have mail aliases, but not users.

5

Nice, I didn’t know about this feature. For others who have a hard time finding it:

  1. Enable config setting “email in” under “☰ → Admin → Settings → Email”.

  2. Go to “☰ → Admin → Groups → <choose group> → Manage → Interaction” and set “Email: Custom incoming email address”.

    (This setting is not visible before enabling “email in” in the previous step.)

If the OP wants the email to message inbox feature only for a few users (say, staff members), it will be acceptable to configure it manually for each of these users. Then, the above technique together with groups with one member only are a suitable option.

The “custom incoming email address” of each group can still be set in format “Discourse username @ my Discourse domain”.

7

Interestingly, this works:

  1. Create a new group admins_messaging in Discourse
  2. When incoming emails are enabled, this groups can be directly emailed on rather convoluted but still functional email address ourdomain+admins_messaging@discoursemail.com

However, trying to trick the system by sending the email to the existing admin group to this email address does not work:
ourdomain+admins@discoursemail.com

Is there a way to send emails from the outside to admins or moderators groups?
If not is there a way to re-direct/forward received messages from created admin_messaging group to admins group?