Messages to other users should provide message text in notification email

[Jesse Friedman @ UCSF]

Messages to other users should provide message text in email

[François Marier (fmarier)]

This used to be the case but we changed it because people kept replying to the "<email address hidden>" email address instead of logging onto the site and replying from there.

Perhaps it should be a site-wide setting?

[Sean Brennan (the-ioniser)]

Maybe depending on how a mahara system is setup (mail smtp working) , for systems setup correctly, "noreply" should be a unique key eg. facebook emails for comments look like this "<email address hidden>" for replying to comments

for systems that don't support receiving email, limit the message shown and include a link like usual to direct them to sign in to view it.

[Andrew Nicols (dobedobedoh)]

The infrastructure for this is already in place. Mahara uses the Variable Envelope Return Path (VERP) technique for it's bounced e-mail catcher which validates a bounced mail and increases a bounce-count for that user, eventually disabling e-mail for this user.

It should be possible to add a case to the switch in lib/user.php->process_email() to catch the comment case relatively easily. At the moment, the only case is B - bounce.

When sending the e-mail, passing a different address type (the default is B) to generate_email_processing_address() will ensure that the correct address is generated for the VERP handler. It will also be necessary to modify this function to take the parameters you want --when I wrote the VERP handling system, I didn't know what other kinds of options may be wanted, and in what format so I left this out at the time.

It should be relatively easy to set this address as the From address in email_user() whilst retaining the bounce handler (Sender). Most mail clients should send replies to the From address and a well-behaving MTA should send the bounces to the Sender.

[François Marier (fmarier)]

Also see bug #738263 for some potential problems with this solution.