Incoming Email

Gitea supports the execution of several actions through incoming mails. This page describes how to set this up.

Requirements

Handling incoming email messages requires an IMAP-enabled email account. The recommended strategy is to use email 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.