• Registered: 2008-11-11
  • Posts: 3

Topic: e-mail gateway

While I can understand how people might like to type into web pages to post to forums and then keep coming back many times a day to see if they got any responses, some of us have days that are just too busy for such "polling" for information.

I want to propose an e-mail<->forum gateway.  That is, when a new message is posted to a forum, I get an e-mail with the topic as a Subject: and the posting contents in the body.  I should be able to reply to such an e-mail in my e-mail composer and have my reply posted back to the forum.

This way, I get to participate in the forums in a more interrupt driven manner and I get to use that same interrupting tool to not only read but respond to forum posts.  Effectively the forums would look like a mailing list to me in my mail program.

  • User33
  • PunBB senior member
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2008-02-03
  • Posts: 875

Re: e-mail gateway

This is a really nice concept. I wouldn't know how to implement it, though.

  • From: Russia
  • Registered: 2007-12-13
  • Posts: 642

Re: e-mail gateway

Prefect idea for the great extension.
Add this to the http://punbb.informer.com/wiki/punbb13/ … n_requests please.

Carpe diem

Anatoly's Website

4 Reply by MattF (edited by MattF 2008-11-12 23:53)

  • MattF
  • Senior Member
  • Offline
  • From: South Yorkshire, England
  • Registered: 2007-03-15
  • Posts: 1,956

Re: e-mail gateway

You'd need to be extra vigilant to details with this type of mod. If done incorrectly, it would be opening a forum up to spam with a vengeance.

Edit: The correct term is a bridge, btw, not gateway. smile

MattF's Website

  • Registered: 2008-11-11
  • Posts: 3

Re: e-mail gateway

MattF wrote:

You'd need to be extra vigilant to details with this type of mod. If done incorrectly, it would be opening a forum up to spam with a vengeance.

Indeed, it would have to be done with the same kind of controls that most mailing lists use currently like confirmed subscriber post only, etc.  Most mailing lists today survive without the deluge of spam you are fearing.

Indeed, it would probably be smart to leverage the most popular MLM out there, Mailman, and simply gateway the forum into/out of that.

MattF also wrote:

Edit: The correct term is a bridge, btw, not gateway. smile

Maybe.  How do you figure bridge is the right term and gateway is not?

6 Reply by MattF

  • MattF
  • Senior Member
  • Offline
  • From: South Yorkshire, England
  • Registered: 2007-03-15
  • Posts: 1,956

Re: e-mail gateway

brian_j_murrell wrote:

Indeed, it would have to be done with the same kind of controls that most mailing lists use currently like confirmed subscriber post only, etc.  Most mailing lists today survive without the deluge of spam you are fearing.

I don't fear. It's a simple fact. Those mailing lists do have the deluge. They merely have the correct restrictions in place to make sure it never reaches the lists themselves, most of the time.


brian_j_murrell wrote:

Indeed, it would probably be smart to leverage the most popular MLM out there, Mailman, and simply gateway the forum into/out of that.

Not exactly what you would call a light method. If the forum is dealing with the posts and their replies, the forum should deal with the processing. The main MTA's can easily enough have a pipe transport set up to forward the message to the relevant forum script for further processing. List software should be a choice, not a prerequisite.


brian_j_murrell wrote:

Maybe.  How do you figure bridge is the right term and gateway is not?

It's a gateway to the forum, but you are bridging different functionalities. If you prefer gateway, call it a gateway. It matters not to I.

MattF's Website

  • Registered: 2008-11-11
  • Posts: 3

Re: e-mail gateway

MattF wrote:

I don't fear. It's a simple fact. Those mailing lists do have the deluge. They merely have the correct restrictions in place to make sure it never reaches the lists themselves, most of the time.

Semantics.  The point is that mailing lists prevent spam from reaching the subscribers which would be equally valid for making sure it does not reach the forum pages as well.

MattF wrote:

Not exactly what you would call a light method. If the forum is dealing with the posts and their replies, the forum should deal with the processing. The main MTA's can easily enough have a pipe transport set up to forward the message to the relevant forum script for further processing. List software should be a choice, not a prerequisite.

I think you are underestimating the value of good list management software.  It's far more than just an alias expander.  It could start out as a few lines of code which sends posts out via the MTA but I'd guess before you were done, you would have for the most part re-written Mailman.  Why re-invent the wheel?  Mailman is really not that heavy.  I'd say for the most part the MTA does more work that Mailman does.

8 Reply by MattF (edited by MattF 2008-11-13 04:37)

  • MattF
  • Senior Member
  • Offline
  • From: South Yorkshire, England
  • Registered: 2007-03-15
  • Posts: 1,956

Re: e-mail gateway

brian_j_murrell wrote:

I'd say for the most part the MTA does more work that Mailman does.

Quite true. The MTA is the primary workhorse. One simple fact however is that every *nix system under the sun comes with a MTA installed as default, (as far as I know), as part of the base system. The same is not true of list software. Take Mailman, for example. Whilst requiring the installation of the list software itself, you also have its Python dependency, and most likely some other dependencies. Especially for someone who is inexperienced with system admin, adding that level of necessity to what should be a simple mod/extension is pretty absurd.

I can see the point you're making, and do in part empathise with your point, but it is still a lot of unnecessary software. The forum has all of the verification info it needs. Why replicate, or have to create an auth lookup in an external system, when the forum itself can decide which user addresses are valid without external influence? It is outside the scope of a notable percentage of people who setup a forum to setup a list server too.

Message parsing would be the one area that would be a bind. big_smile

MattF's Website

9 Reply by MattF

  • MattF
  • Senior Member
  • Offline
  • From: South Yorkshire, England
  • Registered: 2007-03-15
  • Posts: 1,956

Re: e-mail gateway

Bugger. Crappy memory moment again. I intended to suggest earlier, (and became sidetracked), that possibly the XML-RPC setup would be more suitable to the task of doing this?

http://www.xmlrpc.com/

It would be more in keeping with the general flow, unless there is a specific reason for using e-mail based systems? Unless I've overlapped some of the info I've remembered from the past, (wouldn't be the first time), this type of system is used in some blogging software for the same type of scenario.

MattF's Website

  • From: Java
  • Registered: 2005-03-24
  • Posts: 121

Re: e-mail gateway

hello, any update with this extension?

if found this library for bridge between php and mailman, perhaps can be usefull
https://github.com/simison/PHP-Mailman

Web hosting multi Center
Social Estate
Online Store & Gift Shops
a simple URL shortener

whiteh0rs3's Website