Using Friendica's email connector

Friendica’s email connector is a very powerful, integrative feature. It allows to you add conventional email contacts to your social networking stream.

That means that you can send a status update out to friends or relatives who don’t use any social networks at all – and they will simply see it in their email clients, while your other contacts may read the same message on Friendica or Facebook. Also, you can view any mails you receive from those email contacts in your general social stream on Friendica. So people like your parents or grandparents could be in your social stream, although they don’t actually participate in social networks and don’t want to. Of course, their messages will then only be visible to you personally.

Activating the connector

This functionality is easily set up in Friendica. You will find it under Settings -> Connector Settings. Scroll down to Email/Mailbox Setup. Now enter your email account details as if you were configuring a desktop mail client. Find your ISP’s support info on this topic if you lack any account details.

What happens next has stumped a few people in the past, so we’ll spell it out here:

NOTHING AT ALL!!!

Since you haven’t got any email contacts configured within Friendica yet, you can’t see any. Friendica doesn’t scan your address book or check out who you know. You will have to tell the system about it.

To import an email contact into your Friendica stream, you have to enter that contact’s standard email address on your Friendica’s contacts page, as if they were a Friendica, StatusNet or Diaspora contact. And there’s a condition for this (to prevent people using Friendica as a spam platform): You must currently have a mail from that contact in your IMAP inbox – that’s your normal mail inbox that you access with a mail client.

To test this, write yourself an email, using your mail client. Then add your own email address as a contact in Friendica. See the message on Friendica, now? Respond to it from Friendica. Now check your email inbox with your normal mail client.

You can put an email contact into the private groups you define within Friendica, and posts to those groups will also get delivered to that contact. You can also tick a box in the privacy settings when issuing a public post – and that post will go to email contacts, too. Replies will reach you in your personal stream, but for privacy reasons, they won’t go any further from there. Only you see them, not the other people participating in the respective thread. In future, this is going to change by mutual consent – so that people can elect to follow you and participate in your discussions by email. But we’re not there yet. And it’s going to be optional, and it will require permission from the people communicating with you by mail.

Note: If Friendica refuses to add a mail contact as described above, try prefixing mailto: to the address (mailto:friend@mail.com). Specifically, this may be necessary for gmail addresses.

Technical issues

There is only one requirement that your site admin needs to fulfil – and that’s making sure that the generic PHP IMAP module is installed on the server machine. On public Friendica servers or sites run on shared hosts, this is normally already the case. If you or your site admin is running a virtual server, the module may not be there yet. Ask your admin about this or install it yourself, if you are running your own site. Shout for help if you can’t work out how to do this. There are plenty of Friendica Support forums with members who are glad to offer advice.