Help with Emails and Forums/Discussions | Communifire Support

Hi, 

Happy new year! I am working on trying to understand how we might be able to use emails and discussions in some of our spaces. Can someone just walk me through what I can do here? I think I have set up the email setting correctly to get responses through email. But how do people get the ability to respond to the forums in their email? Any information would be great. 

Thank you, 

Rebecca 

Hi Rebecca,

Once you've set up forum posting via email with a catch-all email account, people can reply to discussion emails to send replies. When they reply to the email, the to-email-address will be in a format like forums-1-16-17@yourdomain.com.

You should have updated the following settings in Control Panel > System > General Settings > Email Settings to add the catch-all email account and enable forum posting:

• Incoming mail server 
• Port
• Use SSL
• Catch-all email address 
• Catch-all email account password
• Enable forum posting via email

If you've already done this, check a discussion email you've received recently, and see whether replying to the email produces a to-email-address like forums-1-16-17@yourdomain.com.

If you see this, send a test reply and confirm that your email reply is posted in Communifire. The reply can take up to 5 minutes to appear in Communifire after you send it.

Grace

Grace, 

Do I need to turn on email notifications for the forums to make this happen? And can that be space specific or is it site-wide? 

Thank you, 

Rebecca 

Hi Rebecca,

Currently your site has the Communifire.Subscribe.Forum.Notification and Communifire.Subscribe.Forum.Topic.Notification emails disabled. You can enable these in Control Panel > System > Email Templates to enable discussion and forum emails. This will enable the emails site-wide. It isn't possible to enable the emails for specific spaces only.

Discussion and forum emails are sent in the following cases:

• You created a discussion and someone replies to it
• You replied to a discussion and someone else replies to it
• You subscribed to a discussion and someone replies to it
• You subscribed to a forum and someone posts a new discussion or replies to a discussion

People can subscribe to and unsubscribe from individual discussions and forums to control these email notifications. Refer to Subscribe to Discussion and Subscribe to Forum for more details.

In each space, you can also subscribe all space members to all space forums to send them emails for all new discussions and replies. To do this, visit the space then go to Manage Space: Settings and check "Auto-subscribe new/existing members to all forums". Then save settings.

Grace

ok, I think the catch-all email is set up and I'm receiving notifications now, but I'm still not able to reply by email. Am I supposed to do something in each space to allow this as well? 

Hi Rebecca,

You don't need to change any space settings.

Does the to-email-address change to something like forums-1-16-17@yourdomain.com when you try to reply to an email?

I see errors related to the catch-all email in the exception log. There may be an issue accessing the account with IMAP. Could you try switching to POP? This has worked better for us when using a Gmail account.

Change the email account's settings:

1. Open Gmail.
2. In the top right, click Settings and then See all settings.
3. Click the Forwarding and POP/IMAP tab.
4. In the "POP download" section, select Enable POP for mail that arrives from now on.
5. At the bottom of the page, click Save Changes.

Then update the settings in Control Panel > System > General Settings > Email Settings:

• Change imap.gmail.com to pop.gmail.com
• Change port 993 to 995

Grace

Grace, 

I tried that and still received a bounce back on the email. It looks to provide the correct new forum reply - forums-72-123402-@gmail.com but it's bouncing back and saying it's undeliverable. Let me know your thoughts. 

Thank you so much, 
Rebecca

Hi Rebecca,

Sorry for the confusion. The catch-all email should be an email account in a domain that your organization owns, and the email should be used for only your site. Using an email address with gmail.com won't work.

The catch-all account for a specific domain accepts emails sent to addresses that don't exist on that domain. So if an email is sent to forums-72-123402@yourdomain.com, the email automatically goes to the catch-all's inbox. Then Communifire would process the email.

Grace

Just wanted to include  Guy Chalk on this. 

Thank you, 

Rebecca