Hi! In my discourse instance I want to create a readon-only mailing list mirror (from google groups), but I’m having issues with making discourse subscribe the mailing list.
In order to subscribe the mailing list I need to send an email to mailinglistname+subscribe@googlegroups.com and then reply to the email to confirm. But since discourse created that email for me, I can’t do those actions.
How can I then, subscribe a mailing list for mirroring? Am I missing something?
I briefely asked about this here but I think a support ticket is more appropriate.
I don’t have a Google Group to test this out on. Is sending an email to the group the only option that you have for joining the group, or is it possible to join through the Google UI?
If we can’t find someone to help answer your question, I’ll try creating a Google Group to see what needs to be done.
Currently you can’t even signup via the web interface (before it was possible). But the problem is the confirmation, which has to be done either by replying to the email or by clicking the link on the email (none of which I can do with this setup).
I’m guessing here. Does the confirmation email from the group show up in the Discourse rejected email list? That list is found on your Discourse site’s Admin / Emails / Rejected page. If it does, you might be able to find the confirmation link by clicking on that email’s hyperlinked error message.
Upon repeating the process I realised that no email got sent (neither in the “sent”, not “bounced”, nor “rejected”).
The other day what I did to manage to get one sent and receive the reply asking for the confirmation (which I couldn’t open) with a “hack” where I used the “advanced-test” tab to send an email to the the mailinglistname+subscribe@googlegroups.com. But it was really a desperate attempt since it wouldn’t be sending from the correct mail box either way.
So in conclusion the first problem that needs solving is that it doesn’t automatically send an email to subscribe to the list.
Also, the url of the mailing list is mailinglistname@googlegroups.com but the url to subscribe is mailinglist+subscribe@googlegroups.com and it’s not explicit in the instructions which one I should use.
I was able to get this to work with a Google Group by adding the category’s incoming email address to the group’s members page. I’ve set the group up just for testing this, so I gave it the most relaxed possible permissions. The issue you are running into could be related to the group’s permissions.
The Google group’s ‘from’ email address and the category’s incoming email address are separated with a pipe (|) character. Discourse should configure this automatically for you when you enter the group’s from address into the category’s incoming address field and save the category. The address that I used to subscribe to the group is the category’s incoming email address (sc_email_test+scossar-mailing-list-5@discoursemail.com)
@simon this not only worked perfectly (the solution is to use the google groups interface to manually add a member as you suggested) but also gave me an idea on how to importing mailing lists but in a massively simpler way – using a mailinglist archive and remail everything to discourse.
