Incoming Email

Incoming Email

GitLab has several features based on receiving incoming email messages:
  1. Reply by Email
  2. New issue by Email
  3. New merge request by email
  4. Service Desk.
See the upstream docs for more information.


Set up
You can configure production.incoming_email in /app/data/gitlab.yaml with the IMAP information. The mailroom service is automatically started when production.incoming_email.enabled is set to true (verify using supervisorctl status in the Web Terminal).


Testing
  1. Reply by Email - Each issues has a per user email address. Click on the ribbon in the issue page to find this address.
  2. New issue by Email - You will find the unique email address per user in the issues page of the project.
  3. Service Desk - Enable this for a project in Settings -> General -> Service Desk. The support desk email address is displayed here.
  4. Service Desk custom address - This step is only required if you want to a set a different support email address than the incoming email address. To set a custom Service Desk address which is shared for the full instance, add a section service_desk_email in /app/data/gitlab.yml as mentioned here:
production: &base
  ... other configs ...
  service_desk_email:
    enabled: true
    address: "project_contact+%{key}@example.com"
    user: "project_contact@example.com"
    password: "[REDACTED]"
    host: "my.domain.com"
    port: 993
    ssl: true
    start_tls: false
    log_path: "log/mailroom.log"
    mailbox: "inbox"
    idle_timeout: 60
    expunge_deleted: true

Be sure to restart GitLab after making the above changes.