Question

I have a friend looking for a groupware-like application, and TWiki seems to fit all her needs, except I'm not sure it can automate a mailing list. Can TWiki automatically send emails to a group of users when email is received at the list's email address, like Majordomo or Mailman?

It would seem to be something very easy to do, since you already have users and groups, and each user has an email address, so I assume there is a plugin for it. I have not found one yet.

Thanks.

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-- DavidKramer - 24 Oct 2002

Answer

This does not yet exist. Sounds like a useful Plugin or Add-on. A good start is probably Plugins.MailInAddOn.

Related topics have been discussed in Codev: BringingUsersInFromAnEmailSystem, CopyToEmail, ForwardMailToTWiki, SubmitTopicByEmail,

-- PeterThoeny - 26 Oct 2002

Perhaps some of the EmailNotificationEnhancements could be used for this, but I wouldn't want to see a full-blown email list manager as part of TWiki. I run some email lists on my domain using GNU Mailman, which is a good package - this is not a simple piece of software, as it must deal with a huge number of details such as user validation, subscribe/remove, authentication, mail bounces, and more. To do a very basic email list manager would be quite easy, but it would not work well and would make life harder for the administrator and subscribers.

What might be useful is some simple integration - e.g. to share authentication of TWiki users with an email list package - that way, the user can just sign up to TWiki once and then be able to edit their email list details through the website. This should be done as a plugin - Mailman uses cookie-based authentication, which is supported by some TWiki plugins and is easier to use normally.

-- RichardDonkin - 29 Oct 2002

Mailman integration stuff, yes, a great idea for a plugin or addon!

-- GrantBow - 15 Jan 2003

A related question I have is that I would like to 'envelop' my Mailman webpages, that are dynamic in nature via cgi-bin/python, in my TWiki installation. Is there a way to embed cgi-bin in TWiki so that these Mailman pages would have for example their own web under TWiki, displaying themselves inside TWiki ?

-- RobLingelbach - 05 Jun 2003

Not sure if this would do what you want, but you could simply INCLUDE the output of a cgi-script into a TWiki topic.

Alternatively write a Plugin (or add code to the DefaultPlugin) that expands a variable you invent by calling an external script. Example for a MailmanPlugin: %MAILMAN{ action="showlist" name="foo" }%

-- PeterThoeny - 06 Jun 2003

Thanks for the advice, and the INCLUDE will work for a particular page, but if I want to incorporate all of (for example) the GNU Mailman pages within, say, a TWiki web or topic, is there any builtin capability for that in TWiki ...hm, thinking out loud I suppose this might be possible using apache's

RewriteEngine

, and with symbolic links in the TWiki directories pointing to the mailman directories, but maybe that's too forceful. Incidentally Peter I find TWiki just about the best www project I've ever seen.

-- RobLingelbach - 08 Jun 2003

come to think of it a bit more, what i'm looking for above may not be worthwhile, because it presents what one wouldn't want edited in the TWiki collaborative environment.

-- RobLingelbach - 08 Jun 2003