Ability to reply to emails sent by application server

[AGhost-7]

Use case:

Users can interact with the application by sending emails to it. You can also just reply directly to an email notification and it will update the thread stored in the app. Similar to how you can interact with issues on Github. I'd like to be able to test this kind of functionality using the UI in Mailhog.

[ian-kent]

Sorry, I don't really understand why this would be useful? What would replying to an email actually do?

[cwbit]

e.g. if you're building something like a support / customer management platform where emails can be sent directly to customers from the system and when the customer replies your platform interacts with the email to update contact logs, notes, etc. based on the email reply.

Like how github issues send emails to watchers and replying to that email will actually post your reply as a comment on the issue

[ian-kent]

That makes sense, but I'm not sure how MailHog helps with that? Any reply from the UI would just be sent to MailHog, which you'd need to read from the API, and I can't see how that is useful?

If your application is designed to receive emails via SMTP (i.e. it's acting as a mail server itself), that isn't something which is supported by MailHog - though in theory it could.

[AGhost-7]

What I'm suggesting is adding such a feature. I tried to add the feature but got stuck trying to test out my change. Having some information on how to get started to develop for this project would help greatly as I'm not familiar with Go.

[urbaniak]

From web interface there can be a way to reply to the message (which gets stored in different inbox, accessible only via IMAP for example). That will allow to fully test some message replies (just like reply to comment via email in github) using MailHog.

[yelizariev]

Is this issue in Confused state? We actually need the same. For example to test how the app handles replies.

[jcuna]

Found a use case for this today as well. Building a system that hides original From email field to all support staff and instead uses message-id, etc for tracking. Being able to reply within Mailhog would have made this work I'm doing much faster.

[ndench]

Ideally MailHog would be able to send the reply email directly. The way this is usually implemented is with the Reply-To email header. I also feel that the majority of people implementing replyable email notifications (myself included) are using some sort of email/SMTP service such as Postmark, SendGrid, AWS SES, etc.

So MailHog could accept SMTP credentials from environment variables and send the replies that way, or it could use the base system mail() command.

[ndench]

MailHog actually has the ability to "Release" an email. So a workaround for the moment is enter your SMTP service details into MailHog and release the email to an address you control. Then you can reply from there.