Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

A dream: Posting to a DG via email

Author:David Theige
Posted:2/25/1999; 2:11:59 AM
Topic:A dream: Posting to a DG via email
Msg #:3228
Prev/Next:3226 / 3229

Caveat: I'm not a programmer, nor am I an experienced Frontier developer. I am an experienced Frontier user and I'm successfully running a Frontier 6 beta server with a discussion group. It is entirely possible that the following ideas make no sense .

I'd like to find a way for users to post to a Frontier 6 discussion group via email. I see a couple of potential advantages:

The email client may be a better/more familiar text editor than the web browser.

If file attachments sent by email could become enclosures to a DG message...yum, yum!!

How this might work:

Users send email to a specified mailbox. A server-side app watches this mailbox, and parses messages received into a format suitable for posting to the DG. Is this a job for a ContentServer-like Frontier app? Or would something else be more suitable?

The parsed email is then sent to the DG server somehow. Is this a job for XML-RPC?

It would be cool if email received from a DG member could be accepted for posting, while email from non-members might generate some sort of automated response.

About file attachments...

Background: I have a medical school course where students and faculty communicate via an email list. A threaded DG would be much better, ...but list members make heavy use of file attachments. The attachments are sometimes GIF or JPG images that are easily stored in a Frontier ODB, but often they are Word or PowerPoint files.

I'd love to have a way to get file attachments sent by email into a Frontier ODB, ideally as DG enclosures. I've been hoping for some time that Eric Soroos' Frontier mailServer would include a facility for handling attachments...

Can PDF files be stored in the ODB? Will the DG accept a PDF file as an enclosure?

We've done some experimenting at our school with converting PowerPoint files to PDF with Adobe Acrobat. The results look great! A big advantage is that users on the browser-side don't need PowerPoint to view the files. The PDF files are also smaller than the original PowerPoint files. Acrobat Reader is free and fairly ubiquitous.

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