IMAP support for group inboxes

[anon73664359]

Yeah, will support for other email providers like Outlook and iCloud come sooner rather than later?

Oh, and that isn’t even counting lesser known email providers.

[mognet]

I agree this is the best option.

[trobiyo (Ismael Posada Trobo)]

Hi @martin,

Sorry if this was already asked, but could not find any reference on Meta.

According to:

@martin

Only Gmail is currently supported as an IMAP provider . We have some generic IMAP functionality but it is not guaranteed to work. Outlook online is our next big target for support.

Is it still under your plans to incorporate Outlook/Exchange Online for IMAP? If so, how Discourse will connect to Outlook/Exchange Online, giving the fact that MS is moving into the OAuth2 authentication direction ? (as per Authenticate an IMAP, POP or SMTP connection using OAuth | Microsoft Docs)

Cheers,
Ismael

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

Sorry, we don’t currently have further improvements for IMAP support on our roadmap, nor do we have plans to add support for other providers at this time.

It turned out to be a far too complex piece with too many edge cases to worry about.

I recommend sticking with the simple to reason about POP3 integration.

[trobiyo (Ismael Posada Trobo)]

Hi Sam,

Many thanks for your reply. Indeed we will like to stick to POP3 if possible, but if I’m not mistaken, Discourse communicates with basic-auth with POP3.

According to MS, basic-auth will be phased out as of October 2022 (please see Basic Authentication and Exchange Online – September 2021 Update - Microsoft Tech Community - Starting September 1, 2022, we will remove the opt out option, and starting October 1, 2022, we’ll begin turning off Basic Auth in all tenants, regardless of usage.).

Hence, re-formulating my question. Is it under your plans providing Oauth2 authentication for the current POP3 mail protocol?

Thanks,
Ismael

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@trobiyo

but if I’m not mistaken, Discourse communicates with basic-auth with POP3.

We actually do SSL by default

discourse/discourse/blob/841c90044cd9065d3fd69043f68b0b27de8604b6/config/site_settings.yml#L1115-L1115

[Anders_Johansson]

Hi, I use iRedmail Server, I have no problem connecting to my IMAP server but can’t choose which mailbox to syncronize.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

Is this still supported and/or possible?

documentation tweak

@martin

allow staff to tag pms

This is now pm tags allowed for groups

Add Gmail to another email client - Gmail Help says

To keep your account more secure, Gmail no longer supports third-party apps or devices which require you to share your Google username and password. Sharing your account credentials with third-parties makes it easier for hackers to gain access to your account.

Instead, look for the option to “Sign in with Google,” which is a safer way to sync your mail to other apps. Learn about Sign in with Google.

So I guess the Google doesn’t want us to do this anymore?

Also, on the system where I set this up before on the group settings page, I click the “test” buttons and it claims SMTP and IMAP settings are valid but error logs show:

Unexpected error when checking SMTP credentials for group 42 (support). : OpenSSL::SSL::SSLError : SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 peeraddr=142.251.163.109:587 state=error: wrong version number

[martin (Martin Brennan)]

I’d like to announce that sadly, we are going to be sunsetting IMAP support in Discourse. Neither we nor any of our customers use this, and the functionality has always been alpha-stage since release, with no further plans for future support.

We will be doing this within the next few months. If it proves easy enough, we will split out the functionality into an unsupported plugin for self-hosters, otherwise we will have no choice but to remove it completely from the codebase.

I will post further updates here when I start removing things.

[hellekin]

Note that Stalwart-mail developper Mauro de Gennaro would be interested in Discourse ↔ Stalwart integration. Maybe the existing code can be used as a starting point? Placing the code you want to remove, @martin, in a plugin would be useful in that case.