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Maniphest T7734

consider hiding email commands from help menu if inbound email is disabled
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Description

As the documentation notes, inbound email is hard to set up properly if the service you're using doesn't offer good support for processing. I haven't set it up on my install and don't intend to for a while.

But with the new help button that appears on some pages, users are clicking through to the email commands documentation that they would never have found otherwise. It's not a huge deal, but this just cases confusion. It would be a bit nicer if it documentation for disabled features wasn't pushed in front of them.

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Event Timeline

• sshannin created this task.Apr 2 2015, 1:10 PM
• sshannin raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.
• sshannin updated the task description. (Show Details)
• sshannin added a project: Documentation.
• sshannin added a subscriber: • sshannin.
epriestley added a subscriber: epriestley.Apr 2 2015, 1:14 PM

The page shows a prominent warning that the stuff won't work, right?

Screen_Shot_2015-04-02_at_6.14.22_AM.png (263×994 px, 39 KB)

• sshannin added a comment.EditedApr 2 2015, 1:34 PM

Yeah, but why send users to a page that's just going to tell them stuff is disabled?

More to the point, now they're salivating over these features and we're not at the point infrastructure-wise to support inbound email.

Again, not a big deal by any means, but I think it's nicer just to not even waste their time/attention going to a page for disabled stuff.

chad edited projects, added Mail, Setup; removed Documentation.Apr 2 2015, 2:10 PM
epriestley added a comment.Apr 2 2015, 2:41 PM

Yeah, but why send users to a page that's just going to tell them stuff is disabled?

We tell users about available features so they can learn the feature exists, and either configure it or ask their administrator to configure it if it's something they'd find useful.

Generally, we'd prefer to make this easier to configure over hiding it, since users learning about a feature, getting it configured, and then being happier is in everyone's interest.

  • MailGun and SendGrid are easy to configure, what are the reasons they aren't suitable in your environment? (Note that you can use separate providers for inbound and outbound mail, so even if outbound is on something that's hard to configure, you can route inbound through something that's easier.)
  • If we allowed inbound email over IMAP (T1109), would that be suitable?
• sshannin added a comment.Apr 2 2015, 3:02 PM

For better or for worse, we're on Exchange. It mostly works.

You could fill a book with things I don't know about email, but I do know that setting up postfix is a major pain. I haven't pursued MailGun or SendGrid because I don't really have any heavy email needs.

A good portion of my users are on Notifications only (no email), and the rest really just use phabricator email as a poke to go check phabricator.

Setting up inbound email is on my list of things to do, but I think it's pretty low as far as being a good use of time; it's more of a treat right now.

epriestley closed this task as Wontfix.May 4 2015, 2:05 PM
epriestley claimed this task.

This has been in HEAD for about a month and we haven't seen any other installs reporting issues with it. If it's still causing problems, you could disable it locally like this until inbound mail gets set up:

diff --git a/src/applications/base/PhabricatorApplication.php b/src/applications/base/PhabricatorApplication.php
index d5237ad..3decad3 100644
--- a/src/applications/base/PhabricatorApplication.php
+++ b/src/applications/base/PhabricatorApplication.php
@@ -188,6 +188,7 @@ abstract class PhabricatorApplication implements PhabricatorPolicyInterface {
     }
 
     $command_specs = $this->getMailCommandObjects();
+    $command_specs = array();
     if ($command_specs) {
       $items[] = id(new PHUIListItemView())
         ->setType(PHUIListItemView::TYPE_LABEL)
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