PloneMailBridge

OBJECTIVE

PloneMailBridge was an (old) experiment to provide a temporary bridge between PloneWebMail and PloneMailBoxer to support simple moderated mailing-list without installation of a mailserver.

BACKGROUND

On a Linux machine, installing a mail server, such as sendmail, is relatively easy.
Some installation of Zope/Plone are on a Windows machine, where installing a mail server, such as sendmail, is not so easy.
Moreover, not always people wants to manage email accounts on in-house servers.
So, we think the proposed approach could retain some sense also when a Linux server is available and when (and if) a more integrated product, such as PlonePostOffice, will be available.

APPROACH

In order to reach the goal, we managed to have PloneWebMail and PloneMailBoxer collaborate in some way.
We consider the following scenario

• a PloneWebMail_box gives access to an IMAP account on a remote mail server
• a PloneMailBoxer, associated to the same email address of the PloneWebMail_box, manages a list of subscriber addresses and the access to a remote SMTP relay
• a Plone user, acting as moderator of the mailing list, "broadcasts" to the subscribers individual messages received by the list.

IMPORTANT: Broadcasting to a mailing list is specified by prefixing its mail address with the "list:" string.

PREREQUISITES

• PloneWebMail (with its prerequisites)
• PloneMailBoxer (with its prerequisites, including MailBoxer)

• Access to an external mail server and control of a mail account (mailbox) with IMAP4 support
• Access to an external SMTP server (relay), whose address should have been specified in the Mail configuration of the Plone setup.