Phabricator Administrator's Handbook/Configure inbound e-mail/Using an existing mailbox

You can configure inbound e-mail in a Phabricator also using an existing mailbox.

This aspect is not covered in the official documentation because it's somehow alpha.

How it works edit

  1. Alice writes to a dedicated e-mail address, like bugs@example.com
  2. A daemon checks the mailbox, acting like any IMAP client
  3. The daemon discovers the incoming e-mail from Alice, and passes it to Phabricator
  4. Phabricator processes the e-mail and creates a Task etc.

The advantage of this solution is that it's simple to be deployed, because the mailbox can be any normal mailbox.

This solution may not involve any external service: the mailbox may be in your mailserver as well.

The daemon is Free software under the Apache 2.0 license.

Requirements edit

Note that this requires some packages.

In Debian-based distributions:

apt install php-imap php-mailparse

Configuration edit

The configuration is intended for GNU/Linux and other Unix-like systems. Adapt it for your needs.

Start cloning these small repositories:

git clone https://gitpull.it/source/phabricator-inbound-imap-spooler.git
git clone https://gitpull.it/source/php-imap-spooler.git

Copy the example configuration:

cp phabricator-inbound-imap-spooler/config-example.php phabricator-inbound-imap-spooler/config.php

Then edit it for your needs:

nano phabricator-inbound-imap-spooler/config.php

Notes:

  • IMAPBOT_PATH_PHAB must be the root of your Phabricator installation (a filesystem pathname)

Then try to run the bot:

./phabricator-inbound-imap-spooler/bot.php

If it works, you may want to create a Systemd service similar to this one:

# /etc/systemd/system/phabricator-inbound-email.service
[Unit]
Description=Phabricator E-Mail receiver
After=syslog.target network.target mysql.service

[Service]
Type=simple
User=phabricator
Group=phabricator
ExecStart=/path/to/your/phabricator-inbound-imap-spooler/bot.php

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Then enable and start the service:

systemctl daemon-reload
systemctl enable phabricator-inbound-email
systemctl start  phabricator-inbound-email