[development] [announcement] Integration of roundcube webmail in drupal

[Gerhard Killesreiter]

Keegan Quinn wrote:
> Disclaimer:  I mean no offense to anyone who has developed
> Drupal-mailing-list-related modules or software before.  It's
> entirely possible that some patch or module would have done
> everything I needed.  Please correct me if so!
>
> On Thu, Apr 13, 2006 at 04:36:47PM +0200, zeljko blace wrote:
>   
>> Is there any interest in Dev community to develop connections to any
>> well known mailing-list software (especialy those that have nice web
>> archive interface like Mailman)?
>>     
>
> I don't know that I am "in the dev community" but I have done some
> preliminary Drupal + Mailman integration.

So did I. Together with Matt Westgate in 2003, I think.

>   If I could choose again, I
> would instead avoid the Mailman abstraction layer and implement my
> own list delivery system.

We came to that conclusion as well. This is also part of the reason for 
the existence of og2list.

>   I think it likely that I wrote more code and
> introduced more potential points of failure with the Mailman
> solution than I would have otherwise.
>
> That said, the mailing list system I did this for had the most
> specific set of requirements I have ever heard of.  I ended up having
> to disable virtually every Mailman feature which was not directly
> related to delivering messages and catching bounces.  I don't have
> a great deal of experience with other MLMs, but I would imagine the
> situation would be very similar.
>
> So, in conclusion, if you're interested in having a traditional 
> email list with simple bits of integration (ie. new Drupal users are 
> subscribed if they opt-in), integrating with an MLM might make a lot
> of sense.
>   

Depends on the degree of integration you want to have. You can go easy 
and offer a subscription box that sends a "subscribe me" mail to the MLM 
and use this MLM for all other activities. This does not offer any 
Drupal integration, though. If you want Drupal integration then there 
are a couple of ways to do better (one being a mailman integration with 
mysql) but these things also have a lot of drawbacks.

> On the other hand, if you just need a means of delivering bulk
> messages to Drupal users, consider doing it all natively in PHP.
>   
> (is that what og2list does?  help them out if so!)
>   

No, og2list aims to be a full MLM. Currently implemented is:

- receive news posted to Drupal through the web interface by email
- answer to these news through email, they will show up on the web interface
- subscribe and unsubscribe through Drupal

to do:
- subscribe and unsubscribe by mail
 

If you look for a newsletter module, look at simplenews.
Og2list integrates directly with the MTA in order to achieve its goals, 
so I isn't usable for everybody.

Cheers,
    Gerhard