Emailbox Service

Overview

Provide an email gateway to push emails into MindTouch. This functionality would make it easy for teams/users to capture email threads in one location by specifying an additional email address to cc, bcc, or fwd. This service will only be available for our commercial customers.

Status

First draft available for downloading! (March 26th, 2009)

MindTouch Principals

KarenA, RoyK

Installing

This application is in beta testing.

Security considerations

Using a user with UNSAFEHTML could become a security hole - because there is no filtering done on this service (yet), anybody can email your endpoint - an email containing scripting could execute on the server. For this reason, we suggest that the MindTouch user who is setup to do this posting NOT be allowed to have UNSAFEHTML privileges.

Design Considerations for this service

Protecting the privacy of personal emails should be of utmost importance. To that end, this script should run under the assumption that all emails sent to it are ready to be re-published. Publishing should be an opt-in process rather than opt-out to reduce the need to develop complex filtering mechanisms and to reduce mis-postings of emails that were not meant to be published. From a product standpoint, selective email publishing from personal inboxes should be handled through the Outlook Connector.

Requirements

1. Retrieve emails from both a POP or IMAP interface from a given email address.
   1. Script should be able to deal effectively with different MIME types
   2. Date used should be "Received" header - this will be the header of the recipient's server (and will allow us to not deal with diff timezones)
   3. All email headers should be stored as a page property
2. Take the subject of email, body of email, and any attachments and post them on a new MindTouch page (subject = page title, body = contents, attachments = file attachments)
   
   1. The email timestamp, email sender, email recipients should all be stored as a page property and exposed through a MindTouch template on that given page (simply prefix the content with {{wiki.template("Emailbox Header")}}
   2. The email recipient should be set as a page tag ("email-from:dev@mindtouch.com") (this is to workaround the inability to search properties)
3. We will not attempt to do threading on individual emails - each email should be its own page; we will rely on DekiScript to try to display emails in some readable format (requires some more thinking through)
4. The path of the email as it's stored on Deki should be configurable
   1. The title of the email needs to be unique - a possible default path would be /Emails/YYYY/MM/DD/HH:MM:SS (Using a path which is easily sortable in memory is preferable)
      
      1. This will still not be enough to prevent conflicts - script should recover by appending a hash to the HH:MM:SS title
      2. Display title should be {SUBJECT}
      3. The benefit of utilizing a date format is that it allows us to quickly sort subpages based on its URL without retrieving additional data (like tags or properties)
5. Message parsing: Best effort should be made to strip emails of extraneous/repeated content (nice-to-have)
   
   1. Forwarded emails should have any extra formatting stripped
   2. Replies should attempt to strip repeated content as best as possible, except in the case of inlined responses
6. How to handle multiple emails? An array of email with the associated dekihost/paths?

Project Notes

Initial product prototyping will occur in PHP; once the use cases and workflow are polished, the application will be converted into a C# service for futher polishing - this will simplify the set-up of the server (avoids cronjobs). 

Related forum discussions

• Google Mail Connector
• Posting pages through email

Helping out

While this project hasn't been started yet, please list your name below if you're interested in helping beta test and refine the early iterations of this product. Those who do will be granted access to this connector (either through a commercial license grant, or a non-distributable custom buil) after its commercial release. Also remember to subscribe to this page so you get updates as they are made.