Back Next
The "email-to-discussion" feature is new to Version 4.0.
If a user subscribes to a discussion via email in "ASAP" mode (one of the subscription mode choices), then they will get an an email notification of every message posted. If the "-fetch" flag is added to the metadotd.pl invocation, and a dedicated "discussions" email account set up as described in the Configuring Metadot section of the installation instructions, then the email notifications will be configured so that if the user replies to a discussion message, the reply will be "pushed" back into the discussion next time the metadotd.pl script runs.
More specifically, the notifications will contain a "reply-to" field configured so that if the user replies to the message, the reply will be sent to the dedicated "discussions" account, with identifying information about the discussion and message encoded as part of the "to" information in the reply. Then, the metadotd.pl script will pop the discussions account, process the replies according to their 'to' fields, and publish the content of the replies as new messages in the given discussion.
If a user reply contains attachments, only the first text attachment, or the first html attachment if no text attachment exists, will be used as the content of the new discussion message.
Note: It appears that there may be a problem in using this feature from a hotmail account. The "name" as well as the actual email address in the reply-to field of the notification message must be retained in the user reply message. It has been reported that mail sent from hotmail accounts does not always retain the "name" information. This issue will be addressed in the next release.
Back Next
© Copyright Metadot Corporation 2003. All rights reserved.