Frequently Asked Questions

How do I post new group forum topics via email?

Note: Make sure you have enabled the "User Groups" and "Discussion Forums" components. For the Discussion Forums component, make sure you installed "Forums for Groups" and that you've enabled the discussion forum for the group in question.

1. Navigate to one of your groups. (eg. example.com/groups/my-group/). Click on the "Forum" tab.
2. Now, click on the "New Topic" link or button.
3. You should now see a "Post New Topics via Email" header. Click on the "Find out how!" link. You should see something that looks like this:
4. Copy the email address and compose a new email from the same email address you registered on WordPress with. The subject line will become the topic title.

How do I reply to group forum topics / posts via email?

This feature requires installing the BP Group Email Subscription Plugin.

Note: You can only reply to group forum topics and posts via email if you've setup your group to receive either "All Mail" or "New Topics" in BP Group Email Subscription.

Why does Reply By Email rely on traffic on my site?

BuddyPress Reply By Email hooks into WordPress' scheduling functions and hooks. (Good!) However, the way WordPress works is these schedules are only fired when a user visits your site. (Not-so-good!)

For example, let's say I schedule BP Reply By Email to run every five minutes. Six minutes pass by and I expect my task to run again, however if no user visits my site, the task will not run. (Tear runs down face!)

This isn't so bad if you have a site that generates decent traffic, but what about smaller-scale sites?

A potential solution is to use an external service to hit your website. (Basically a cron job for our cron!)

Here are a couple of free options that allow you to do just that!

• Pingdom - Free plan offers monitoring one website. Intervals are configurable from 1, 5, 15, 30 or 60 minutes.
• UptimeRobot - Checks your website every five minutes.
• Alertfox - Free plan offers to check your site every five minutes.

If you know of any others, let me know and I'll list them here!

Does Reply By Email work with alternate IMAP providers other than GMail?

In theory, yes. But, they haven't been tested with the plugin so far.

If you decide to use another IMAP provider, you will need to make sure they support address tags.

Some free options include:

• Yandex Mail
• My Opera Mail
• FastMail.fm (Note: Fastmail link is a referral link).

All options above use "+" as their address tag.

The plan is to test these in the future and add preconfigured options to the plugin if they work; if you have a chance to test and can verify they work, please let me know! :)