Hi all,
There’s an existing app for this, files_frommail (“Files From Mail”), but it looks unmaintained, its App Store page notes it hasn’t been tested against the last three major Nextcloud releases, and it needs an admin to wire a mail-server-level pipe (a /etc/aliases entry piping to a standalone PHP script) plus the Mailparse PECL extension, which isn’t available on every host.
I’ve been working on a small app that solves the same problem — turning email attachments into files in your Nextcloud — with a different, more self-service approach:
How it works:
- An admin configures one shared IMAP mailbox for the whole instance (host, port, credentials), no mail-server config, no aliases, no PECL extensions. It’s polled over plain IMAP using a pure-PHP library, so it works on ordinary shared hosting too.
- Each user registers the email address(es) they’ll send attachments from, on their own personal settings page, and verifies ownership of that address — either via a confirmation link Nextcloud emails them, or by sending one email with a one-time code (works even without outgoing SMTP configured).
- Every 5 minutes (or on demand, via a “Check now” button or an occ command), a background job checks the mailbox and, for every message from a verified address, creates a YYYY-MM-DD folder in that specific user’s Files containing a text file with the email’s content and every attachment — reply/forward clutter (“Re:”, “Fwd:”, and a bunch of localized equivalents) gets stripped from the subject first.
The key difference from files_frommail is that it’s multi-user and self-service: one shared mailbox can serve an entire instance, and each user only ever sees their own verified mail land in their own Files, without an admin having to register anything per-person or touch the mail server.
It’s currently at a fairly complete v0 stage (Nextcloud 34–35, PHP 8.1+), with a PHPUnit test suite and admin/personal settings UI.
What I’d like to know before even making it available through the Nextcloud app store:
- Is there any interest in such app ?
- Any must-have features before it’d be worth publishing to the App Store?
In any case, this will end in my public github repo at some point: callmemagnus (magnus anderssen) · GitHub
General