Forum OpenACS Q&A: What is wrong with "emailing" openAcs

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Posted by Tracy Adams on
We are here at the Boston bug bash and looking at the issue of sending email to openAcs.  For example, in the forums - the ability to reply to a notification and have it submitted to the forums.

I've heard from various people that this functionality really didn't work.  In fact, I thought it was totally broken.  But others are saying it is not.

So I'm checking - what is not working about this?

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Posted by Tilmann Singer on
Last time I used that was about a year ago. What was wrong with it was that documentation how to set it up was missing and it is really hard to debug. E.g. as far as I remember when the system receives an email it can't deal with for one reason or another it just deletes it silently without logging any error or warning.

And there is simply unimplemented (and possibly hard to implement) functionality like authentication via email and avoiding out-of-office-autoreply loops.

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Posted by Roberto Mello on
And it only worked with if your mail server is Qmail.

Better would be to have some external program that is called by the MTA (through some mail processing agent or directly) that would take care of handling e-mail to OpenACS.

-Roberto

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Posted by Jeff Davis on
The current version only needs a Maildir which you can do with most MTA's (at least that is what I understand from the code) so I am not sure why there would be a dependency on Qmail.

Personally I prefer Maildir + sweeper to something that tries to do direct inserts to the db (since I am more confident that mail won't be unaccountably dropped).

Also, I think the silent deletion and failure to track bounces was fixed by Mat Kovach.

And finally, it does in fact work (with the caveats about not being smart about attachments, quoted text, etc). For example dotlrn.org can accept incoming email to the forums. I would not be surprised though if there were bugs in the oracle version that have not been fixed.

see bug 1843 for the tracking bug.