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Dealing with email in development

Sent emails

To view rendered emails "sent" in your development instance, visit /rails/letter_opener.

Mailer previews

Rails provides a way to preview our mailer templates in HTML and plaintext using dummy data.

The previews live in app/mailers/previews and can be viewed at /rails/mailers.

See the Rails guides for more info.

Incoming email

  1. Go to the GitLab installation directory.

  2. Find the incoming_email section in config/gitlab.yml, enable the feature and fill in the details for your specific IMAP server and email account:

    Configuration for Gmail / Google Apps, assumes mailbox gitlab-incoming@gmail.com:

    incoming_email:
  enabled: true

  # The email address including the `%{key}` placeholder that will be replaced to reference the item being replied to.
  # The placeholder can be omitted but if present, it must appear in the "user" part of the address (before the `@`).
  address: "gitlab-incoming+%{key}@gmail.com"

  # Email account username
  # With third party providers, this is usually the full email address.
  # With self-hosted email servers, this is usually the user part of the email address.
  user: "gitlab-incoming@gmail.com"
  # Email account password
  password: "[REDACTED]"

  # IMAP server host
  host: "imap.gmail.com"
  # IMAP server port
  port: 993
  # Whether the IMAP server uses SSL
  ssl: true
  # Whether the IMAP server uses StartTLS
  start_tls: false

  # The mailbox where incoming mail will end up. Usually "inbox".
  mailbox: "inbox"
  # The IDLE command timeout.
  idle_timeout: 60

    As mentioned, the part after + is ignored, and this will end up in the mailbox for gitlab-incoming@gmail.com.

  3. Run this command in the GitLab root directory to launch mail_room:

    bundle exec mail_room -q -c config/mail_room.yml

  4. Verify that everything is configured correctly:

    bundle exec rake gitlab:incoming_email:check RAILS_ENV=development

  5. Reply by email should now be working.

Email namespace

As of GitLab 11.7, we support a new format for email handler addresses. This was done to support catch-all mailboxes.

If you need to implement a feature which requires a new email handler, follow these rules for the format of the email key:

  • Actions are always at the end, separated by -. For example -issue or -merge-request
  • If your feature is related to a project, the key begins with the project identifiers (project path slug and project id), separated by -. For example, gitlab-org-gitlab-ce-20
  • Additional information, such as an author's token, can be added between the project identifiers and the action, separated by -. For example, gitlab-org-gitlab-ce-20-Author_Token12345678-issue
  • You register your handlers in lib/gitlab/email/handler.rb

Examples of valid email keys:

  • gitlab-org-gitlab-ce-20-Author_Token12345678-issue (create a new issue)
  • gitlab-org-gitlab-ce-20-Author_Token12345678-merge-request (create a new merge request)
  • 1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef-unsubscribe (unsubscribe from a conversation)
  • 1234567890abcdef1234567890abcdef (reply to a conversation)

Please note that the action -issue- is used in GitLab Premium as the handler for the Service Desk feature.

Legacy format

Although we continue to support the older legacy format, no new features should use a legacy format. These are the only valid legacy formats for an email handler:

  • path/to/project+namespace
  • path/to/project+namespace+action
  • namespace
  • namespace+action

Please note that path/to/project is used in GitLab Premium as handler for the Service Desk feature.

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