Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: Group based mailing list

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
It also shows up in the mail-tracking, so you can figure out if some has been abusing this. If you want to you could also change the code and require the from_addr to be a member of the group to be perfectly save.

I will probably be using this with our e-mail savy clients who want to send an e-mail to all members of their subsite / community without using bulk-mail or what other things OpenACS offers.

If this becomes of general interest, I could make sure that every group gets and e-mail address with "mailto:groupname@hostname.com"; and probably include it on the .LRN community members page.

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Posted by Caroline Meeks on
Hi Malte,

Can anyone send email to the group's address and have it delivered or does it check that someone is a group member and/or administrator?

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
As of now the code does not check this. But it is a more or less quick hack for the proof of concept. What you do want to do is get the code out from there and write a callback for incoming_email. Just make sure that the email given for a group does not start with a prefix used by any other installed package.

Or maybe I should just write an additional callback for the incoming email like "incoming_email_matched_party" which could then be used for this.

It would allow each of the package do do what it likes. E.g. dotlrn could define that only administrators can write to the .LRN group while acs_subsite checks if the user is a member of the group (and it is not a .LRN group). And my custom application would deal with it differently.

Which brings me to the question: Can an implementation of a callback stop the further execution of other implementations? E.g. if my callback implementation "aa_malte" has successfully dealt with the e-mail I do not want any other callback implementations to be executed.

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Posted by Caroline Meeks on
Thanks Malte,

If the incoming email has an attachment will it be sent out to all the group members?

What about making the emails searchable. If you can see the emails in mail tracking then I assume its pretty easy to make them searchable. What about attachements to the emails?

Thanks
Caroline

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Posted by Malte Sussdorff on
Yikes. Got me :).

All these new and cool e-mail features do not support attachements as of now, or, more precise, I did not test it yet, but i would be surprised if it worked with attachements. If someone can take a look at the incoming e-mails and run them through mime::whatever to get the attachments, that would be awesome, as you could then add the file to the CR as well (parent_id = sender_id or group_id, depending on what you are doing) and have this file linked from teh mail tracking as well.

Searching those e-mails is a piece of cake with mail-tracking. I am sure some search wizards can quickly write an indexer for the acs_mail_log table and store this in mail-tracking (please!).