Introduction #

The Message Boards portlet included in Liferay has a feature that allows users to receive and send posts as mails, similar to how a mailing list works. This article explains how to set it up.

Set up #

1. Determine what email address to use for posting messages to message board via email. The email address needs to have a subdomain. Let's use events.liferay.com here.

2. Edit portal-ext.properties:

 ##
 ## SMTP
 ##
    
 smtp.server.enabled=true
 smtp.server.port=25
 smtp.server.subdomain=events

3. Create a MX record to map events.liferay.com to the portal hosting the message board.

4. Test replying to a post in notification email.

To test locally, update Hosts file to include events.liferay.com mapped to 127.0.0.1 then test either via telnet (see reference) or an email client (ie: thunderbird). The from-address needs to be one of the valid accounts in portal. The to-address would be mb.123@events.liferay.com where 123 is the categoryId. You can hover a category link in Message Board portlet to get the categoryId.

Note: events.liferay.com is parsed into liferay.com as companyId prior to version 4.3, and as MX with version 4.3. MX can be set in admin portlet > enterprise > mail domain.

References #

• How to use the Message Board as a Mailing List

• Liferay uses SubEthaSMTP to listen for and receive emails over a SMTP port, http://subethasmtp.tigris.org/

• Google on "telnet smtp command", http://www.google.com/search?q=telnet%20smtp%20command&hl=en