Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Forum notifications grouped by subject

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Posted by Michael Cordova on
I have tried to use the "Re: whatever here" form, but it doesn't work as expected.

I have realised that there is another important thing to use in the notification emails, in order to email clients can recognize "groups of notifications" or "notifications related", for instance, a forum thread... For that, we should use the "References" header, which should add the value from the Message-Id header of the "parent" or previous thread message.

I've been looking and thinking about how to change the acs-mail-lite package and acs-notifications in order to do that, but need some help, to do things right.

What I think it should be done is...

  1. Forum package should call to acs_mail_lite::generate_message_id to get a valid ID, and store it in the forum messages table (a new column).
  2. Then call to forum::message::do_notifications passing the Message-Id (notice that it's the ID for the Message_id header), and any parent Message-Id inside the "References" header.

So, notification::new AND acs_mail_lite::send should have two new optional parameters for the Message-Id, and References headers.

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Posted by Emmanuelle Raffenne on
Hi Miguel,

Besides "References" the "In-Reply-To" headers is important too. But even using them clients will treat (or ignore) them differently. For example gmail will "create" a new thread if the subject has been edited, even if those headers are present.

Anyhow, about your proposal, forums shouldn't ask acs-mail-lite for a message ID because forums doesn't know the method used to notify the user. The method could be an email message, but could be also a SMS, an alert onscreen, a Voice message, etc. So the way to reference related information would differ.