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.