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Respond from External Mail Client

1 Requirements

By now (version 5.1), with an e-mail that has been sent from the ILIAS mail server to an external mail client, it is not possible to respond to that mail so the response comes back to the ILIAS mail system.
For that purpose, we would need at least:

• A (visible or hidden) identifier like [username]@[client name].[installation URL] attached to every mail sent from ILIAS.
• An algorithm that is routing response mails adressed to the mail server by means of the abovementioned identifier.

2 Additional Information

• Idea / concept: Suittenpointner, Florian [suittenpointner]
• Interest in funding: Verband Schweizer Papeteristen
• Maintainer: (will be set by Jour Fixe / maintainer)
• Implementation of the feature is done by (will be set by Jour Fixe / maintainer)
• Testcases by: (please add your name if you want to create the testcases for this feature)

3 Discussion

Jansen, Michael [mjansen] Aug 10, 2016: This feature requires the installation/configuration of a dedicated mailbox (this is one aspect I don't like for a standard ILIAS feature) which has to be requested in certain intervals, so a cron job task has to be implemented. This task has to use IMAP functionalities to parse the email body (which is not trivial because of multipart messages).  If both, sender and recipient, could be successfully determined, an internal ILIAS message has to be created. Otherwise an internal message could not be created. In this case the message has to be skipped and the event has to be logged.

• How should the recipient respond to the email received in the external email client? Please keep in mind that the REPLY-TO header value of external emails sent with ILIAS varies depending (because of the SPF) on the context. For automatically created emails ILIAS does not define a REPLY-TO, for manually created emails the REPLY-TO header value is set to the email address of the recpient, the FROM header value is set to the email address defined in the ILIAS administration. So, a unique REPLY-TO header is not given in any case.
• What about attachments?
• The internal mail system does not support HTML, yet.
• What about multiple recipients given in the original email received in an external mailbox?
  • Please describe if there should be an identifier for each recipient (only TO, or TO and CC)?
  • Please elaborate the use case when one recipient anwers to this email. Who should receive it? Only the original sender?
• What about the new message body  when the cron job task processes the email fetched from the dedicated mailbox? Should there be any modifications regarding the body, e.g. removing all identifiers before creating new identifiers? We need a detailed specification based on the expectations of the possible funding party/parties.

I would prefer a cron job plugin implementation (and a small patch to include the identifier).

Hesse, Joel [Joel_Hesse] I like this idea.

4 Implementation

{please give a description of the final implementation and add screenshots if possible}

Test Cases

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• {Test case number linked to Testrail} : {test case title}

Approval

Approved at {date} by {user}.