I’ve searched Google and can’t find anything directly speaking to this question/idea. I would really like to use Discourse for Gmail. Think- email for discourse in reverse. Lots of people want to be able to reply to a topic directly from their Gmail account. What I’d like to do is the opposite. I want to manage my Gmail through a Discourse interface. I like the group conversations, and the modern UI/UX, and the dating system of reading old messages and replies. This is not only the perfect platform for forum discussion and group conversation, but also 1-on-1 direct email as well. Since 1-on-1 DMs are already supported here, I think it would be great if I had a way of either: Digesting Gmail through Discourse OR Using my own mail server with Discourse as the front-end. I prefer the former. I do not know how I would even start working on a project like this, but the level of organization this could bring to the lives of millions would change the email world forever- like gmail did decades ago (and ceased to continue doing). Thoughts/tips?

This might be what you’re looking for [image] IMAP support for group inboxes megaphoneAnnouncements rotating_light We are removing support for IMAP in Discourse. See this post for details IMAP support for group inboxes - #39 by martin . rotating_light We are happy to introduce an alpha version of IMAP support for group inboxes. This feature adds the ability to enter IMAP credentials and settings on a per-group basis to sync group inboxes with an email inbox. email warningwarning warning This is an alpha-stage feature, and as such it is not 100% complete and polished. It is very…

That post has lots of scary “Alpha - we aren’t actively supporting this” messages on it. This might be more up your alley: [image] SMTP support for group inboxes megaphoneAnnouncements We are pleased to announce support for using SMTP to send outbound group emails. This functionality improves the experience of using a group’s inbox on Discourse more like a support inbox. There are a few benefits to using this feature. Why this matters? By default when configuring Discourse all outbound emails uses a single SMTP configuration. This means that “notifications”, “mailing list subscriptions”, “digests” and more all head out from a single endpoint using a single email address. Wh… Do be aware that it is limited to groups. You can of course make a group which contains one person, i.e. you.

But SMTP only allows outbound capabilities. Afaik, one needs to configure both smtp & imap for email sync to work in both directions.

[image] itsbhanusharma: But SMTP only allows outbound capabilities If you read SMTP support for group inboxes carefully, you’ll see that it also covers incoming mail from the same account. I’m not quite sure how (whether IMAP or POP3) as they don’t specify details on that side of things, but it seems to utilise the existing incoming email address functionality of groups. @martin - are you able to enlighten us further?

That’s exactly how it works – the incoming email forwarded from the SMTP account goes to the group, and when email notifications are sent from that group inbox, they are sent via the same SMTP account. This does not handle full syncing like IMAP (e.g. labels, archiving/unarchiving, deleting) but it probably gets you halfway there. The caveat with both IMAP and SMTP support is that they are both limited to the group inbox.

Is it possible to use Discourse for e-mail?

Product Support

itsbhanusharma (Bhanu Sharma) September 9, 2021, 5:59am 2

This might be what you’re looking for

Topic		Replies	Views
SMTP support for group inboxes Announcements new-feature	5	1885	July 7, 2021
IMAP support for group inboxes Announcements new-feature	30	32839	January 12, 2026
Email to Message Inbox? Product Support	5	1082	October 18, 2022
Setting up a support inbox Product Support email	13	1650	January 18, 2023
Discourse settings: IMAP Product Support	1	112	August 14, 2024

Is it possible to use Discourse for e-mail?

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