mahara-contributors team mailing list archive

[Aaron Wells <1249895@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I recently discussed this idea in the Mahara forums:
https://mahara.org/interaction/forum/topic.php?id=5862&post=25149

There's also a tracker bug about it for Moodle, but they haven't
implemented it yet, or we could just port their solution:
https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=14027

Launchpad, as mentioned above, has this feature, and it's open source,
so potentially we can look at how they did it to get some ideas. From
looking at the README files, it looks like they use mailman as a
component.

Best Practical "RT Request Tracker" also has this feature, and it's
GPL(2) so we can look at how they did it:
http://www.bestpractical.com/rt/

Implementation-wise, some things to consider:

1. How does Mahara receive the incoming mail? The main options are to
set up a mail alias on the server that pipes the email to a script, or
to poll an IMAP account periodically. Setting up an IMAP account would
probably be easier for non-technical admins. Although I think most web
hosts allow you to set up mail aliases that pipe to scripts, these days

2. How does Mahara identify what the mail is a response to, and how do
we authenticate the mail? We should probably look at how other programs
are doing this to get the best idea. I think Launchpad uses the
"Message-Id" field in some way, because this gets included back in the
headers of the reply. Using the Message-Id to identify what the mail is
responding to, is fairly simple. To use it to authenticate the mail,
we'd need to perhaps included a hash as part of it.

3. How do we fit this into our Plugin architecture? Probably the plugins
that are generating these activities should be able to do some kind of
subscription scheme where they indicate that responses to the
notifications from the activity should be handled by a particular
function...

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1249895

Title:
  Feature request: Respond to forums and user messages by email

Status in Mahara ePortfolio:
  Confirmed

Bug description:
  It'd be nice to be able to respond to forum posts and user messages by
  email.

  Use case:

  1. I subscribe to a forum, with "email" notifications
  2. Someone posts to the forum. I receive an email with that post
  3. In my mail client, I hit "reply" and write a response to their quote, which I send to the default reply address on the message
  4. Mahara receives my response email, and puts it as a post in the forum (perhaps with a note at the bottom saying it was posted by email)

  A similar use case would work for other Activity types as well:
   - user messages
   - wall posts
   - feedback

  One thing to bear in mind is the security aspect of this. We'd need to
  incorporate some way to check that the user is who they say they are.
  Launchpad, for instance, has this functionality (
  https://help.launchpad.net/Bugs/EmailInterface ), but they require you
  to send it from a "trusted sender domain" that uses DKIM. They also
  require you to PGP-sign your emails if you want to do anything more
  than post comments.

  Another thing to think about is how to fit this into Mahara's Plugin
  system, so that we don't just have a hardcoded list of plugins coded
  into the incoming mail handler.

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