We use Pipedream internally to power a lot of Pipedream services. Today we wanted to enable people to reply to topics in our community via email. I wanted to share how this works since I thought it was a cool workflow.
When you receive email from the community, the Reply-To address will send your reply to community-reply.pipedream.net . The email configuration of that domain is managed via Amazon SES. Any emails sent to that domain trigger a Pipedream workflow using our SES email source (this works like the Pipedream email trigger, but for your-domain.com ). The workflow just forwards the email to the Discourse API, and Discourse parses it and adds your email reply to the right topic.
You can use a similar workflow to handle any inbound email for your own custom domain. It’s a cheap solution (most of it is covered under the AWS free tier) and it’s great when you need to handle email programmatically. The cool thing is that the workflow acts as a catch-all address: any email sent to your-domain.com will trigger your workflow. So you can setup all sorts of custom rules for support@ , sales@ , etc. aliases. Clearly there are a lot of email platforms that handle these email routing use cases, but it was easy to setup on Pipedream and as always, gives us code-level control on how we want to handle email.