Cesareo,
There is a feature for accepting email replies for forums.
The notifications package has a feature to handle incoming notifications and one route is via email.
The basic idea is to setup an incoming email and deposit the valid replies into a Maildir formatted directory with one file for each incoming message.
I have listed some quite old instructions for this that might be of value, but will most likely require some interpretation and updating:
This tutorial guides you in setting up "reply by email" for the forums package. The forums package will email an article to users who are subscribed to notifications. The "reply by email" feature allows recipients of the notification to reply to the forum post by email. The system is configured to receive the email and post the reply to the appropriate forum article.
1. Have the mails delivered in a Maildir formatted directory which the site has read and write access to.
Assuming user web is running the server, the email sender prefix is "notification" and the domain is "domain.com", here are a couple of ways to do this:
a. Mail server in the same machine
- Install a mail server which supports Maildir (e.g. Postfix) in the server.
- Add an MX entry for domain.com pointing to the server on your DNS.
- Configure the mail to deliver all mailto:notification-*@domain.com to user web.
- Create a .forward file in web's home directory containing the location of the Maildir directory
b. Mail server in a different machine (RECOMMENDED)
- Install fetchmail and procmail
- In web's home directory, create a .fetchmailrc file and put:
poll <your.mail.server> protocol pop3 user "<email.account.username>" password "<password>", is web here and wants mda "</location/of/procmail>"
- get demime from http://scifi.squawk.com/demime.stable, save it as demime.pl and give it execute permissions
chmod 755 demime.pl
- Then create a .procmailrc file and put:
:0 w
\* ^subject:.*Out of Office AutoReply
/dev/null
:0 B f b w i
\* ^>
| /usr/bin/sed -e '/^ *>/d'
:0 f w
| /home/<project_name>/demime.pl -
:0 w
</location/of/Maildir/>
NOTE : remove the '\' in '\*'
The first three lines filter out Outlook auto-replies.
The second set of three lines remove quoted replies.
While the 3rd set of lines calls demime.pl to clean the html of attachments and other html that may have been produced by richtext formatting in MS Outlook.
2. Setup the OpenACS notifications package
EmailDomain: domain.com
EmailQmailQueue: /location/of/Maildir
EmailQmailQueueScanP: 1
EmailReplyAddressPrefix: notification
NOTE : Line breaks seems to be getting ignored. To prevent this in forums, locate forums/tcl/. Remove the ad_convert_html_to_text proc around \$reply(content).
3. Restart OpenACS