Forum OpenACS Q&A: Email contributions to the Forum

Collapse
1: Email contributions to the Forum
Posted by Christian Allgood on 08/13/03 04:25 AM

I would like to preface my question with the fact that I am an OpenACS newbie. I was charged with creating a portal site for my client using free (i.e. open source) software, and after evaluating a few of the available options, decided to go with OpenACS (despite my lack of experience with AOLserver, PostgreSQL, and TCL).

Basically, my clients would like an "enhanced" mailing list; something where a member does not have to get up out of his/her comfortable email client to go check message postings at some web site using a web browser, while still providing other more active users all of the benefits that a web interface provides.

My solution using OpenACS would be to allow clients to post to a message forum via email and receive email notifications of new content. While there seems to be plenty of information regarding notifications, I have seen very little about how messages to the forum can be posted via email. The best message I could find was this one, yet it is never explained how this really works.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Collapse
2: Re: Email contributions to the Forum (response to 1)
Posted by Tilmann Singer on 08/13/03 01:04 PM
Unfortunately notifications has zero documentation 😟

The best you can do is to look into the code at notifications/tcl/reply-sweep-procs.tcl to get an idea how it works. What I can remember is that you need to activate the feature by setting a parameter of the notifications package (in the site-map), and dedicate a Maildir directory (it must be in Maildir format - mbox etc. won't work).

Make sure the aolserver process has read and write access to the Maildir  directory and to new incoming messages as well (qmail insists to create them with -rw------- permission, so you should propably tell it to deliver them as the aolserver user).

After activating it a sweeper proc will run periodically to look for new incoming mails in the dedicated maildir. tail -f the error log to see what happens when it doesn't work as expected.

If you don't want to wait for the sweeper proc to be activated automatically while debugging it is advisable to create a script with which you can start it manually, e.g. directly under serverroot/www/test.tcl, that simply contains the line notification::reply::sweep

Collapse
3: Re: Email contributions to the Forum (response to 2)
Posted by Christian Allgood on 08/13/03 10:33 PM

I keep getting an error telling me that I have a "bad to address." This error occurs in the notification-email-procs.tcl script on/around line 202: 

    set to_stuff [parse_reply_address -reply_address $to]
    if {[empty_string_p $to_stuff]} {
     .
     . 
     .

I have no idea why I would be getting this error at all. I'm not testing this using telnet to spoof a message where I might be forgetting important headers. I'm sending it from an typical email client, just as my users would.

Any thoughts?