Reply from email

rumer

I'm new to flarum and was wondering if there is a plugin that allows replying by email? Thank you.

luceos

Not yet, but we might be able to push this out for a client of Blomstra in the future.

linc

Replying to discussions via email is a listserv, which is another category of communication software. Having been part of a team that built this feature for another forum product, my retrospective on it would be that the ROI is very dubious in the forum space. It's super complicated to do it well (mostly around parsing, but also the security issues around validating the sender), the setup overhead makes it very challenging on existing hosting plans so the addressable pool is small in open source, and the number of communities who end up finding it useful is smaller than you might assume. I can't deny it landed some customers, but I'm skeptical it brought in more revenue than the roadmap time cost to build, iterate on, and maintain it.

Anyway I know I'm being a downer just thought I'd share some tears from the trenches before anyone gets too excited about it. 😅

rumer

linc thanks for the insights. I have been observing listserv for quite some time too.

Parsing, it is actually not that bad, Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo's HTML does separate current and past content. In the worst case, the whole email is shown in the post and just have to be edited by a moderator + a developer patching up the parsing (which I find does not happen that frequently). But this does point to another issue which is displaying the post, some UIs display the messed up post better than others, I think Flarum is alright.
Validation, this should be left to the mail agents, SPF and DKIM etc, we assume it is legit as long as it lands in the inbox.
Identification, GitHub uses a unique reply-to address, some use subject while others embed the conversation ID in the content itself.

That said, this extension can even be a separate standalone app to inject the posts into Flarum via API. The ROI comes from not using Flarum as a forum, but as a support portal, discussion tool or even a company communication tool especially those who are particularly messy with their emails (think multiverse situations). The ROI comes from what it prevents rather than what it contributes. 🙂

luceos

Our current idea is to use a service like sendgrid or amazon ses to push incoming mail into a queue job and into Flarum. As for the

linc I'm skeptical it brought in more revenue than the roadmap time cost to build, iterate on, and maintain it

We have no intention to build this as Flarum, but as Blomstra we already received a request to get this done as part of client work. What license it will have (private, premium or open source) as such depends on the client and our choices. As long as this client has a need for it, it will be maintained and collaboratively maintained if released as open source.

But relying as much as possible on outside services will certainly help make things easier (to build and maintain).

linc

luceos Our current idea is to use a service like sendgrid or amazon ses to push incoming mail into a queue job and into Flarum.

That sounds like a more elegant solution. SendGrid was brand new back when we did it. While we did use it for outgoing, we had to build our own email router app on the receiving side.

rumer Parsing, it is actually not that bad

I felt like we were playing edge case whack-a-mole with the support team a few times a year but I hope you have a different experience.

rumer

luceos What is Blomstra?

linc Hmm, once I found that HTML structure that separates past and current in all major mail clients (GMail, Hotmail, Yahoo, Outlook), it was a breeze. It wasn't just plain divs, the divs had attributes that were easy to identify.

luceos

rumer What is Blomstra?

Mods please allow me 😉 https://blomstra.net; is the company I've set up as a companion - yet commercial - entity to the Flarum Foundation to provide managed Flarum hosting, excellent Flarum development and custom design.

linc While we did use it for outgoing, we had to build our own email router app on the receiving side.

There are php packages to do that too. But I understand the need to do the parsing perfectly.

gackes

Hello,
I am very interested in this function to interact with Flarum a bit like a mailing-list. There is Discourse that does this, but it's a ruby on rails gas factory that is complicated to maintain for small associations and amateurs.

Is Bloomstra still planning to develop this plugin? I would be happy to contribute to a crowdfounding.

I saw this depot https://github.com/blomstra/flarum-ext-email-conversations... But I haven't looked at what exactly mailgun is.

luceos

gackes there's a functional beta version 😉 It does rely on mailgun.com for a reliable email interface, see: https://discuss.flarum.org/d/31079-blomstra-email-conversations-post-via-email-to-your-flarum-forum