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

  1. Go to the GitLab installation directory.

  2. 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].

  3. Uncomment the mail_room line in your Procfile:

    mail_room: bundle exec mail_room -q -c config/mail_room.yml
  4. Restart GitLab:

    bundle exec foreman start
  5. Verify that everything is configured correctly:

    bundle exec rake gitlab:incoming_email:check RAILS_ENV=development
  6. Reply by email should now be working.


Return to Development documentation