mail2deck

Provides an "email in" solution for the Nextcloud Deck app

🚀 A. For users

Follow the above steps to add a new card from email.

• Deck Bot is the user who will create the cards and it will be set up by your nextcloud admin.
• In this tutorial email address for Deck Bot will be: bot@ncserver.com

1) Assign Deck Bot to the board.

Deck Bot must be assigned and must have edit permission inside the board.

2) Mail subject & content

Let's assume you want to add a card with title "Update website logo" on board "Website" and stack "To do". You can do this in two ways.

2.1: Set stack and board in the email subject

Here's how the email subject should look like: Update website logo b-'website' s-'to do'

• You can use single or double quotes.

• Case-insensitive for board and stack respectively.

2.2: Set the board in the email address

At the end of the email address prefix (before @) add "+website"

Example: bot+website@ncserver.com

• If board has multiple words e.g. "some project", you'll have to send the email to bot+some+project@ncserver.com

In this case, if you don't specify the stack in the email subject, the card will be added in the first stack (if it exists).

Note:

• Email content will be card description
• You can add attachments in the email and those will be integrated in the created card

2.3: Specify assignee

Here's how the email subject should look like:

Update website logo b-'website' s-'to do' u-'bob'

• You can use single or double quotes.
• Case-insensitive for board, stack and user respectively.

2.4: Specify due date

You can use the optional parameter d- to add a due date to a card. Here's how the email subject should look like if you want to set a due date to the card:

Update website logo b-'website' s-'to do' u-'bob' d-'2022-08-22T19:29:30+00:00'

• You can use single or double quotes.

⚙️ B. For NextCloud admins to setup

Requirements

This app requires php-curl, php-mbstring ,php-imap and some sort of imap server (e.g. Postfix with Courier).

NC new user

Create a new user from User Management on your NC server, which shall to function as a bot to post cards received as mail. We chose to call it deckbot, but you can call it whatever you want.
Note: that you have to give deckbot permissions on each board you want to add new cards from email.

Configure Email

Option 1 - Set up Postfix for incoming email

You can setup Posfix mail server folowing the instructions on Posfix setup, and after that add "+" delimiter (which separates the user from the board name in the email address) using the command:

sudo postconf -e "recipient_delimiter = +"

Option 2 - Use an existing email server

This could be any hosted email service. The only requirement is that you can connect to it via the IMAP protocol. Please note this option may not be as flexible as a self-hosted server. For example your email service may not support the "+"delimiter for directing messages to a specific board.

Download and install

Bare-metal installation

If using a self-hosted Postfix server, clone this repository into the home directory of the incoming user. If not self-hosting, you may need to create a new user on your system and adjust the commands in future steps to match that username.

su - incoming
git clone https://github.com/newroco/mail2deck.git mail2deck

Create config.php file and edit it for your needs:

cd /home/incoming/mail2deck
cp config.example.php config.php
sudo vim config.php

You can refer to https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.imap-open.php for setting the value of MAIL_SERVER_FLAGS

Add a cronjob to run mail2deck.

sudo crontab -u incoming -e

Add the following line in the opened file (in this example, it runs every 5 minutes): */5 * * * * /usr/bin/php /home/incoming/mail2deck/index.php >/dev/null 2>&1

Docker installation

Clone and edit the config.example.php you find in this repository and move it as config.php

git clone https://github.com/newroco/mail2deck.git mail2deck
cd mail2deck
cp config.example.php config.php
nano config.php

Build your image locally

docker build -t mail2deck:latest .

Run the docker image mapping the config.json as volume

docker run -d --name mail2deck mail2deck:latest

Edit your crontab

crontab -e

And add this line

*/5 * * * *  /usr/bin/docker start mail2deck

Finish

Now mail2deck will add new cards every five minutes if new emails are received.