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 spec/mailers/previews and can be viewed at /rails/mailers.

See the Rails guides for more info.

Incoming email

Go to the GitLab installation directory.

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 [email protected]

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: "[email protected]"
  # 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 [email protected].

Uncomment the mail_room line in your Procfile:

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

Restart GitLab:
```
bundle exec foreman start
```

Verify that everything is configured correctly:

bundle exec rake gitlab:incoming_email:check RAILS_ENV=development

Reply by email should now be working.

Return to Development documentation