BuddyPress Email Pipeline and Tokens

Contact-message emails are not custom-templated by the plugin. They go through bp_send_email() against a BuddyPress email post 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)
Default subject	[{{{site.name}}}] {{sender.name}} sent you a contact message
Situation shown in BP Emails	“A member (or visitor) sent a contact message from your profile.”

The post is created idempotently on activation and on every version bump via BCM_Email_Installer::install(). Once the email-type term exists, the installer is a no-op, so admin edits at Dashboard > Emails are never overwritten on upgrade.

Tokens

These tokens are registered at send time in BCM_Frontend_Notifications::build_tokens() and resolved by bp_send_email():

Token	Resolves to
{{sender.name}}	Display name of the sender, or the guest-supplied name when the 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 and slashes and run through wpautop(). Use 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. Use triple braces ({{{inbox.url}}}) because it embeds a URL.

BP-native tokens such as {{{site.name}}}, {{recipient.email}}, and {{unsubscribe}} are provided by the framework, not this plugin.

Default email content

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

<a href="/bp-family/buddypress-contact-me/developer-guide/{{{inbox.url}}}/">{{sender.name}}</a> sent you a contact message:

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

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

<a href="/bp-family/buddypress-contact-me/developer-guide/{{{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. 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 look up an email-only string against the users table (which raises undefined-property warnings on PHP 8.2 and above).
3. If Site admin copy is on, adds every user with the administrator role.

Recipients are de-duplicated by user ID and by lowercase email, so a member who is also an admin never receives a duplicate.

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 address in any header. There is no BCC fan-out from this plugin’s code.

Output buffering

send_email() runs inside the bp_contact_me_form_save action, which fires from the submit request. To keep any third-party hook from emitting whitespace or notices into the JSON response, the plugin output-buffers the 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 && defined( 'WP_DEBUG' ) && WP_DEBUG ) {
            error_log( '[bcm] bp_send_email leaked output: ' . wp_strip_all_tags( $leaked ) );
        }
    }
}

When WP_DEBUG is on, leaked output is logged so root causes are still visible, without breaking the response.

What you cannot do

• There is no bcm_email_subject or bcm_email_body filter. Edit the post at Dashboard > Emails.
• There is no per-role email template. All roles use the same email post.
• There is no scheduled or digest mode. Emails are sent in real time during the submit request.

For conditional templating, unhook BCM_Frontend_Notifications::send_email() and reimplement it in your own plugin against the same bp_contact_me_form_save action.