BuddyPress Email Pipeline & Tokens

Contact-message emails are not custom-templated by the plugin. They go through bp_send_email() against an email post type entry installed on activation, so every email inherits the standard BuddyPress header, body card, footer, and unsubscribe handling.

Email type

Field	Value
Email type slug	bcm-contact-message
Constant	BCM_Email_Installer::TYPE
Post type	bp-email (BuddyPress core)
Taxonomy	bp-email-type (BuddyPress core)
Admin label	“A member received a contact message”

The post is created idempotently on activation and on every version bump via BCM_Email_Installer::install(). Once the post exists — i.e. once the term is in the database — the installer is a no-op, so admin edits at Dashboard → Emails are never overwritten on future plugin upgrades.

Tokens

These tokens are registered at send time in BCM_Frontend_Notifications::build_tokens() and resolved by bp_send_email() against your edited email post:

Token	Resolves to
{{sender.name}}	Display name of the sender, or the guest-supplied name when sender is 0.
{{recipient.name}}	Recipient’s display name (display_name from get_userdata()).
{{contact.subject}}	Message subject, stripped of HTML and slashes.
{{contact.message}}	Message body, stripped of HTML, slashed cleared, run through wpautop() for paragraphing. Triple-braces in the template ({{{contact.message}}}) because it embeds HTML.
{{inbox.url}}	Deep link to /contact/inbox/{message-id}/ on the recipient’s profile. Triple-braces in the template ({{{inbox.url}}}) because it embeds a URL.

BP-native tokens like {{{site.name}}}, {{recipient.email}}, and {{unsubscribe}} are also available — provided by the framework, not this plugin.

Default email content

Subject: [{{{site.name}}}] {{sender.name}} sent you a contact message

<a href="{{{inbox.url}}}">{{sender.name}}</a> sent you a contact message:

<strong>{{contact.subject}}</strong>

<blockquote>{{{contact.message}}}</blockquote>

<a href="{{{inbox.url}}}">Open the message in your inbox</a> to reply or delete it.

This is the value emitted by BCM_Email_Installer::schema() on activation. After the post exists, all edits happen at Dashboard → Emails → “A member received a contact message” — there is no plugin setting that mirrors the body content.

Recipient assembly

BCM_Frontend_Notifications::collect_recipients() builds the recipient list per send:

1. Always includes the message recipient (by user ID).
2. If Sender copy is on:
   • Sender is a member → adds them by user ID.
   • Sender is a guest → adds them as a BP_Email_Recipient(email, name) so BuddyPress does not try to look up an email-only string against the users table (avoids PHP 8.2+ undefined-property warnings).
3. If Site admin copy is on, adds every user with the administrator role.

Recipients are de-duplicated by user ID and lowercase email address — you can never get a duplicate email even if a member is also an admin.

Per-recipient delivery

bp_send_email() is called once with the full recipient list. BuddyPress sends one email per recipient internally, so recipients never see each other’s email addresses in any header — there is no BCC fan-out from this plugin’s code, BuddyPress handles each address as a private send.

Output buffering

send_email() runs inside the bp_contact_me_form_save action, which fires from the REST submit callback. To prevent any third-party hook on bp_send_email-internal actions from emitting whitespace or notices into the JSON response stream, the plugin output-buffers the entire bp_send_email() call:

$ob_started = ob_start();
try {
    bp_send_email( BCM_Email_Installer::TYPE, $recipients, array( 'tokens' => $tokens ) );
} finally {
    if ( $ob_started ) {
        $leaked = ob_get_clean();
        if ( $leaked && WP_DEBUG ) {
            error_log( '[bcm] bp_send_email leaked output: ' . wp_strip_all_tags( $leaked ) );
        }
    }
}

When WP_DEBUG is on, leaked output is captured and logged via error_log() so root causes are still surfaced — they just do not break apiFetch with “response is not a valid JSON response”.

What you cannot do

• There is no bcm_email_subject or bcm_email_body filter — edit the post at Dashboard → Emails instead.
• There is no per-role email template — all roles use the same email post.
• There is no scheduled / digest mode — emails are sent in real time during the submit request.

If you need conditional templating (different copy for VIP recipients, for example), unhook BCM_Frontend_Notifications::send_email() and reimplement it in your own plugin against the same bp_contact_me_form_save action.