Drupal MailForum module

Early versions of the DLIST platform used a standard web forum with email notifications to support online discussion. The problem was that new users were not aware of, nor subscribed to, existing threads that had been running. Also, many users were more familiar with the mailing list mode of interaction – and attempted to reply directly in email.

After a series of user interviews established this as one of the major weaknesses of the platform, we implemented MailGust – then an open source mail/forum hybrid developed on LAMP. Members of the DLIST community could post messages in either forum or using email and would be part of the same conversation, much like is used in Google Groups. Subsequent testing shows that both modes of contribution were popular – some using email because it is more at hand, others the web interface for its improved affordance to contextualise a replay within a thread of conversation.

Unfortunately the MailGust project died an early death, developers literally shut down the associated open source community. With an increasingly outdated code-base and functions commented in foreign language, it was time to move on. When the DLIST web platform was migrated to Drupal, Organic Groups provided the first half of a solution. What we needed was some way to integrate OG Forums with the MailHandler module to allow email notifications to go out on forum posts, but also for users to be able to reply to these.

We developed a custom module, MailForum, to meet the requirements – nods to Mail2Web for providing a very base to start from. MailForum allows custom mapping between Organic Groups and a MailHandler inbox. It respects OG moderation settings and user group membership, and relies on simple Pop3 mailbox configuration to provide for incoming mail.

The OG_Mailinglist module by Kyle Matthews is very similar – mainly differs in that it relies on direct configuration of the mail transport to allow creating virtual email boxes from within the app. This has the advantage that a new forum/list does not require an inbox to be manually created, but does require a level of server access which we did not have in our managed hosting environment.

The MailForum module is not well documented, and coded mainly to support the needs of the DLIST distribution of Drupal and OG, but is free to adopt and use. Contact me if you are interested, or want a copy of the code.