Direct Email reply

Introduction

Enable this feature to allow users to reply to chat messages by directly replying to email notifications they receive. We currently use subaddressing for this feature.

Set up credentials

Go to Administration settings > Email > Direct reply.

After that:

• select the email server protocol (IMAP or POP)

• your email server host name (e.g. imap.example.com or pop.example.com)

• the port (143 or 993 for IMAP and 110 or 995 for POP)

• ignore TLS true if port 143 or 110

• email check frequency (in minutes) if POP server (>=2)

• delete intercepted emails. We recommend to select/keep true if you don't want to keep copy of email messages, in case IMAP server.

• a separator (default and recommended) is the character separating base and tag part of the email. E.g.: base+tag@domain (separator: +). More info here

• your credentials (Username & password)

  Once filled, click Save changes.

Example settings

IMAP settings

IMAP server configuration.

POP3 settings

Make sure your POP3 server keeps keep no copy of emails, otherwise it is treated as a new message every time.

POP server configuration.

Now, you can reply chat messages via email. It supports full formatting like inline, multiline, bold, italics etc.

Switch from IMAP to POP

• Before you switch from IMAP to POP over the same email address, you must empty all the folders. Keeping all emails results in duplicate messages, because all those messages in POP are treated as new messages.

Note

• Currently, only emails in English are supported, or at least the quote On <date>, <author> wrote: is in English.

An Email body in languages other than English may also work until and unless On <date>, <author> wrote: is in English or a copy of older email is removed manually.

• Only text messages are supported; attachments are not supported yet.

Known issues

Quoted headers

Quoted headers aren't picked up if the email client breaks it up into multiple lines.

GMail breaks up any lines over 80 characters for you.

On <date>, <author>
wrote:
> blah

Not to mention that we are searching for on and wrote. It doesn't work with other languages.

Possible solution: while replying, remove everything else than your actual message.

Weird signatures

Lines starting with - or _ sometimes mark the beginning of signatures:

Hello

--
Rick

But some users change this convention:

Hello

Mr Rick Olson
Galactic President Superstar Mc Awesomeville
GitHub

**********************DISCLAIMER***********************************
* Note: blah blah blah                                            *
**********************DISCLAIMER***********************************

Problem?

Your message wasn't posted? Did you get an Invalid Email in the Admin console? This most likely means that the email format was not as expected. Maybe you were blocked or the message/room was deleted.