[Pmwiki-users] Mail interface for adding to pages (was Action or form a new page)

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud
Thu Feb 5 11:57:33 CST 2004


On Wed, Feb 04, 2004 at 09:11:34PM +0100, Christian Ridderstr?m wrote:
> 
> > What I really wish I could do is to use my mail agent to forward excerpts
> > of an email message such as Christian's to be posted (appended?) to a 
> > wiki page.
> 
> And you want to use your MUA because that's where you "were" when reading
> the news/mail? (This is just a check really).

Yes.  I'm already there and the MUA already has the entire text of the message
available for me to edit.  If I have to do it in the wiki editor, then I have
to open a browser, navigate to the appropriate page, copy the text into the
page, yadda yadda yadda.  

Also, I can request things to be posted to wiki pages as I'm composing
my responses to the message, and just 'bcc' the wiki-post address before
replying.  For example, assuming we use [[append:]] to denote the excerpted
text...then my reply would post your excellent summary to the Development
group...

[[append:Development.MailGateway]]
> Purpose: Be able to take the important ideas from a new or mailing list
> and "store" them on a wiki so that they don't get lost.
> 
> Items:
>  * This should be quick and simple to do.
>  * You do it by forwarding the relevant post
>  * Do a 'one-way-pass' over the mail, adding simple markup that
>    indicates what should go where.
>  * The receiving software do simple reformatting of '> ' etc
>  * It's not important that the formatted result in the wiki is perfect
[[append:]]

Also, everyone on the list can see that this text was posted.  

This feature also becomes incredibly useful for FAQ documents, since I can
both answer the question in email and add the response to the wiki page in a
single message.

> Ideas:
> * The information added to the wiki should contain a 'signature' or 
>    something, so others now it came via an e-mail, and from where.

I was thinking of simply adding the a line with the email return address,
the subject, and an archive reference if available.  At some point we 
could get fancier and translate email addresses into signature lines.

> * We can use the 'Subject:' to indicate actions or other things

I prefer doing it as directives within the message itself, although we
could allow both.  Thus someone could reply to a message and post to
the wiki in a single operation.  This becomes difficult if the subject
line has to be changed.

> Questions:
> * Do we only want to append information to pages?

An option to prepend makes sense to me.

> * Should information be allowed to be appended to any page?
> * Should anyone be allowed to do this?

Well, any page that isn't otherwise protected by an edit password or other
security.  I would expect the security features of the gateway to be very 
similar to what listservs currently provide (and have some ideas about 
how to accomplish this).

> * Should pages that allow information to be appended contain special 
>   markup, thus also indicating where the information is added?

Perhaps, but many times I expect the mail-to-wiki gateway will be used to
create new pages.

Pm



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