forgejo/docs/content/doc/usage/incoming-email.en-us.md
KN4CK3R fc037b4b82
Add support for incoming emails (#22056)
closes #13585
fixes #9067
fixes #2386
ref #6226
ref #6219
fixes #745

This PR adds support to process incoming emails to perform actions.
Currently I added handling of replies and unsubscribing from
issues/pulls. In contrast to #13585 the IMAP IDLE command is used
instead of polling which results (in my opinion 😉) in cleaner code.

Procedure:
- When sending an issue/pull reply email, a token is generated which is
present in the Reply-To and References header.
- IMAP IDLE waits until a new email arrives
- The token tells which action should be performed

A possible signature and/or reply gets stripped from the content.

I added a new service to the drone pipeline to test the receiving of
incoming mails. If we keep this in, we may test our outgoing emails too
in future.

Co-authored-by: silverwind <me@silverwind.io>
Co-authored-by: Lunny Xiao <xiaolunwen@gmail.com>
2023-01-14 23:57:10 +08:00

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---
date: "2022-12-01T00:00:00+00:00"
title: "Incoming Email"
slug: "incoming-email"
draft: false
toc: false
menu:
sidebar:
parent: "usage"
name: "Incoming Email"
weight: 13
identifier: "incoming-email"
---
# Incoming Email
Gitea supports the execution of several actions through incoming mails. This page describes how to set this up.
**Table of Contents**
{{< toc >}}
## Requirements
Handling incoming email messages requires an IMAP-enabled email account.
The recommended strategy is to use [email sub-addressing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Sub-addressing) but a catch-all mailbox does work too.
The receiving email address contains a user/action specific token which tells Gitea which action should be performed.
This token is expected in the `To` and `Delivered-To` header fields.
Gitea tries to detect automatic responses to skip and the email server should be configured to reduce the incoming noise too (spam, newsletter).
## Configuration
To activate the handling of incoming email messages you have to configure the `email.incoming` section in the configuration file.
The `REPLY_TO_ADDRESS` contains the address an email client will respond to.
This address needs to contain the `%{token}` placeholder which will be replaced with a token describing the user/action.
This placeholder must only appear once in the address and must be in the user part of the address (before the `@`).
An example using email sub-addressing may look like this: `incoming+%{token}@example.com`
If a catch-all mailbox is used, the placeholder may be used anywhere in the user part of the address: `incoming+%{token}@example.com`, `incoming_%{token}@example.com`, `%{token}@example.com`
## Security
Be careful when choosing the domain used for receiving incoming email.
It's recommended receiving incoming email on a subdomain, such as `incoming.example.com` to prevent potential security problems with other services running on `example.com`.