I'm not seeing Messages from Project Tasks I follow or in fact from any module.

I expected Discuss to work out of the box but it does nothing.

I Googled and found instructions that suggest a incoming and outgoing email server entry is required for every User, but this seems like a bit of a hack.  Why would Discuss need to refer to an external email server to handle messages passed within Odoo?

In any case, I setup an incoming and outgoing email server using IMAP referring to a MS Office 365 account, but although the links are reported to be working when using the "Fetch Now" button, no emails appear in Discuss and the "Test Connection" button in the outgoing server returns a positive result, but no sent emails reach their destination.

Is the external email server approach a red-herring?

Are there any step by step instructions on how to setup the Odoo Discuss module?

We are using Odoo V9 and I'm a total Odoo novice, but any help would be appreciated.