In future, Cameo will handle its own incoming email directly (instead of checking a separate mailbox every so often).

To introduce this in a controlled way, we need to change the addresses you send to. The old addresses will continue to work for the next few weeks, but please start using the new addresses now. New addresses look like this: destination@to.cameo.example.com

Background

Sending emails to Cameo lets you do things like:

  • forward evidence of gift aid declarations,
  • attach copies to direct correspondence to a membership record,
  • add files to the file store,
  • add bank statements,
  • forward automated unsubscribe requests for Cameo to act on

This is particularly convenient when you already have the material to hand in an email. See profile → incoming email for the full list of things you can do.

Currently, you send emails to a mailbox provided by a third party. Cameo then checks this in-box periodically, pretty much as you would manually. The easy availability of free Gmail mailboxes partly motivated this method originally. Unfortunately, the software used by Cameo for connecting to mailboxes is no longer compatible with Gmail, making this a much less attractive way of doing it.

So, emails now go directly to your Cameo server, straight to their destination. This allows for:

  • more consistency and self-sufficiency,
  • easier support,
  • less reliance on a hotch-potch of third-party mailboxes,
  • no need to rely on the single email addresses currently used in some installations,
  • more rapid delivery of email

The examples below assume your top level domain is example.com, with your Cameo installation at cameo.example.com.

Email address

A Cameo installation at cameo.example.com will receive email sent to addresses like this:

destination@to.cameo.example.com

That is, the sub-domain you send to, after the @ sign, is the sub-domain of your Cameo installation, with the extra component to in front of it.

The name part of the email address, before the @ sign, provides the destination within Cameo. This will be familiar in some installations. In others, you currently use a + sign in the name part of the address followed by the destination.

For example, if you currently use an address like tocameo+attachment@example.com, now you should use attachment@to.cameo.example.com. However, if you already use an address like attachment@tocameo.example.com, the only difference is an extra dot after to.

You can see the available email destinations set out in profile → incoming email, as before.

Membership attachments

The new addresses can also include a membership number to add attachments to in the email address itself. For example: attachment+1234@to.cameo.example.com or giftaid+1234@to.cameo.example.com. (Currently you can put it in the subject and other places, which has not changed, but this adds another convenient way of addressing them).

You can now also send to just the membership number. For example, 1234@to.cameo.example.com has the same effect as attachment+1234@to.cameo.example.com or attachment@to.cameo.example.com with #1234 in the subject line.

Bounces

Messages that are rejected by the recipient’s provider (because they deem it spam, or the recipient does not exist and so on) are bounced. An automated reply goes to a special email address. Cameo previously used a separate sub-domain for this. This is no longer necessary. We can dispense with the additional sub-domain.

Bounces will be returned to bounce+emailid@to.cameo.example.com.

One-time set up for administrators

Cameo no longer has any admin-configurable settings or credentials in profile → incoming email.

However, where we don’t have access to your DNS (the control panel for the domain names you own) to do it for you, you need to add MX and SPF records in addition to the DKIM and DMARC records you should already have. Administrators can see the DNS settings required in profile → incoming email. These will usually be as follows:
to.cameo MX priority=10 TTL=300 mx1.mythic-beasts.com.
to.cameo MX priority=10 TTL=300 mx2.mythic-beasts.com.
to.cameo TXT v=spf1 include:_spf.mythic-beasts.com ~all

(Mythic Beasts then relay the mail to Cameo).

Technical documentation

For those of you who have access to Cameo on GitHub, technical details are in docs/email.md. This forms part of the information on how to set up a Cameo server.