Geeklog Forums

Incoming email idea...

GL can send out email, no problem. Now, what about the reverse? I was driving to work thinking about some of the people in my organization: They can use email and read the web. But that's really it -- filling out a web form is just too much. But, if I gave them an address (or put them in the Outlook address directory) to which they could just email their stories, I know that they'd use it more. I also think this might have some other interesting applications for use besides helping out tech-shy users.

So, I was wondering just how hard would it be to gateway incoming email into the submission queue? Several years ago I setup a number of people to run HyperNews which was a simple little Perl app that was made obsolete by Slash, Nuke, Geek, etc. But at its time, it was pretty cool. Just like GL, it could send out new stories to registered users. But, it could also receive incoming mail and gateway it back to this structure of this news system. Just for fun, here is a link to the script mail-incoming.pl that did all the work.

In terms of GL, here is my brainstorming:

1. Run UW IMAP on your GL box.
2. Create a mailbox for each topic.
3. Using the PHP IMAP functions, run a cron job to check mailboxes for waiting stories. If there is a message, have the script then write that email to the submission queue. The topic would be defined by the mailbox name to which the email was sent, the title of the story would come from the subject line of the email, the author could perhaps be the name/email of the sender, and the body would come from the body of the email.

Post your thoughts about this and I'll do some more digging. Perhaps this weekend I can take some time to work on writing this script.

Or is this just a crazy idea?

If all you are doing is dropping them in the submission que, how is this different from just opening up the email yourself and making the post? Another issue you will run into is formating, how are you going to explain to the none technical author that their pretty html mail did not quit work in Geeklog? Just some thoughts I had that caused me to drop the idea. Tom