Setting an incoming e-mail address for the staff group

[totte]

I’d like for people to be able to reach the staff group of my Discourse installation via e-mail without the need to sign up first. A helpdesk solution seems a bit excessive, but a shared inbox in the way that group messages work should be just enough. However, the option to set a custom incoming e-mail address is only available for custom groups, not the automatic ones. When searching here on meta for “staff incoming e-mail address” the only result is this:

Configuring Reply via Email

If your Discourse does not have incoming email set up, here’s how: if you already have basic reply via email set up (which is common on hosting plans), and you want to add the ability to start a new topic via email, see this topic. You have two options for enabling incoming emails to your Discourse: polling via POP3 or pushing to the API 1. Polling emails via POP3 If you want to poll emails using POP3 you must first setup email polling. For that, I recommend that you follow the tutor…

Is there a reason for as to why this option is omitted for the staff, admins, and moderators automatic groups?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Not really, other than being explicit about intention.

[totte]

Are you saying that the automatic groups are not intended to be used in this manner? I suppose I could make do with creating a group named “staff2” or the like and use that, but I expected there to be another solution for this use case, given this topic:

Discourse as a private email support portal

Purpose We would like to set it up so Discourse can act as a private email support portal for a team. In this mode a single email address will be mapped to a category, all incoming mail will create new messages in that category that can be viewed by all the users with permission on the category. Users will be automatically provisioned as emails come in. Advantages over central email box Historically we have used a central email box for our team “support” this has proven to have quite a few draw…

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

We have a group called “team” for this purpose.

https://meta.discourse.org/groups/team

There may be admins who are not part of the Discourse team for various reasons; that’s why.

[totte]

There may be admins who are not part of the Discourse team for various reasons; that’s why.

I understand the reasoning to be that since the group “staff” is managed automatically, and there is the possibility that I might grant moderator or administrator access to someone outside my corresponding “team” e.g. for the sake of troubleshooting, and this individual would not be obligated nor interested in resolving issues on our behalf (and rightfully so) regarding new users trying to sign up, but still retain access - it is better to be explicit than implicit, and create a specific, manually curated group of staff members that are able and willing to handle incoming e-mails (received as group messages) from (staged) users who are unable to sign up or for any other reason require contact by e-mail outside Discourse on their side but still inside Discourse on the staff side.

[Anatolia]

How can I set a support group like “team” to receive and reply for incoming e-mails? I want to reply to e-mails within the Discourse.

[pfaffman (Jay Pfaffman)]

Have a look at Start a New Topic via Email ✉