[Zope] Proposal for mail-in to Zope

[Maik Roeder]

Hi !

Simon Coles wrote:
> Does this sound like what people need? Any thoughts, comments, warnings?
> 
> I don't know yet what kind of schedule we'll be able to do this on
> but drop me a mail and when there's something to play with we'll let
> you know.

I wanted to define this as a Task for the ZDP-Tools, but I only
made some research into this, so I hope this helps in any way...

Greetings,

Maik Röder


Mailbag 

    It would be nice to have a Mailing list tracker on the ZDP site, where all
    messages, which are sent to all of the Zope mailing lists are kept. The messages
    could then be used for searching on specific topics, and could also be directly
    reused when new pieces of documentation are written. 

    Reusing pieces of documentation right now means to track the mailing lists,
    using your own mail reader, or going to one of the online Mailing list trackers
    like egroups, and then cutting and pasting the message into your documentation.

    Just taking over content is not nice without giving credit to the original author. It
    is also not very user-friendly because much of the discussion, which has been
    surrounding the posting in the original discussion thread is simply lost. The
    original thread can be very useful for ZDP visitors, who may want to have a
    look at it when they see it quoted. 

    Right now, giving a pointer to the original post is hard, because you can not be
    sure whether the site you are pointing to always keeps the URL, or for what is
    worse, even disappears. We need to be sure that a quoted message along with
    it's thread still exists in the future. 

    We don't have enough space on the ZDP site to keep the whole Zope mailing
    lists, and so we are planning to digest the incoming mails only for a certain
    period of time. Afterwards, the mails will be deleted if they haven't appeared in
    a thread that has been quoted. 

    We don't have the ressources to update the Mailing List Tracker everytime a
    mail is sent to a mailing list. So, to quote a mail, we need to manually upload all
    mails which have been written to that list since the last update. We also need to
    update threads to which new mails have been posted in the meantime. 

    We also lack a tool for uploading messages to the Zope site. We could extend
    the Mailbag product by Tres Seaver which uses the Python 'rfc822' and
    'mailbox' modules to parse messages and mailboxes. 

    Lately, Tres Seaver has rewritten Mailbag, refactoring the logic into Python
    classes. The corresponding ZClasses for the presentation layer still have to be
    rewritten, but can possibly be taken over from the previous Mailbag version. 

    To get the mail into Zope, a program needs to be written that calls Mailbag via
    ZClient when a mail arrives. Another type of program could be useful for
    importing existing Mailboxes into Zope. 

    For delivery, an MDA like procmail could spawn a program out of a .forward
    file and ask it to upload the mail to a Zope folder according to a predefined set of
    recipies. 

    There exists a Python program called getmail which takes mail from a POP3
    server and delivers it into a mailbox. The delivery part of this program uses a
    getmailrc which could be used instead of the procmail recipies. 

    Once the mail is in a local installation on a ZDP members own Zope server, it is
    easy to export the email and upload it to the ZDP site. From there, the ZDP
    members can quote the message easily by directly pointing to the URL. 

    This way, we may not get a complete mail archive, but at least we can always
    be sure that the quoted mails and their surrounding thread exist. 

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