Mirroring a Manila DG in email

The object is to permit the discussion group (DG) of a Manila website to be "mirrored in email"; all postings to the DG are distributed to a list of email addresses and postings to the DG can be made using email.

On a Macintosh server, using EIMs as the mail server, EIMs can be configured to notify Frontier via the finger server. The finger server then adds the message to the DG, attempting to make responses to the original messages wherever possible.

There are lots of ways this can be used. The simplest way has Frontier sending an email copy of each posting to a list of email addresses. If the subscription list is large, or there is a need for email list digests, then its best to set up a standard email list using a list server somewhere and have Frontier "subscribe to" that list.

To use this you must have a separate mail account for each Manila Discussion Group with the (short) name of the Manila website. So if your mail server domain is mydomain.org, the email account for myfirstSite is myfirstSite@mydomain.org. All these email accounts should auto-forward to a single "special" email account on the mail server you set in user.prefs.mailhost from which Frontier collects email. The auto-forwarding tricks allows your Manila email accounts to be at any number of different email servers, Frontier needs to know the name of only one server - the same on it sends membership confirmations thru.

To post you send a message to the account that matches the website name. If membership is enabled on the website, then your email address must identify an enabled member just as if you were trying to post with a web browser. If your email address doesn't identify a valid member your message is discarded without any notification.

You receive emails if you appear in "Send notification to" list of email addresses in the Editorial Panel of the admin pages. I thought about allowing subscription by email, but it's a complication and I think unnecessary. A small number of email subscribers are easily handled by the Managing Editor. Larger lists are best handled by setting up a real email list (on a listserver) and having people subscribe and un-subscribe in the normal way. You don't need to be a member of the DG as long as messages from the list set a consistent value in their Sender fields (most lists appear to).

Which emails will you receive? All those are currently sent as New Messages, New Stories and New Picture notifications - subject to the prefs settings in the Editorial panel.

I've decided not to attach the picture to the picture notification messages for now, I'm not sure it is useful and it's the sort of thing I hate to receive on email lists.