[Rolodap-develop] Email System

[Philip W. <p.g...@st...>]

Hi All,

The email system has been a bit of a chore.
I've finally managed to get something running and sending emails.
I'll go over the problems and solutions for anyone who is interested.
Firstly I figured that allowing only one attachment was a tad mean, so I added 
the ability to add more attachments using "More Attachments" and "Fewer 
Attachments" buttons. This meant that mailform.phtml has to be its own 
"action", so that clicking the buttons brings you back to it. I moved the 
functionality of startmailer.phtml into mailform.phtml inside an "if($send)" 
condition. Startmailer.phtml is now redundant.
Various changes had to be made to mailform.phtml and sendmail.phtml in order 
to handle an array of attachments rather than a single one.

My next headache was getting sendmail.phtml to run. On my system (Debian 
Woody) the php executable is /usr/bin/php4. I've hard coded it for now. 
Perhaps PHPEXEC should be a setting in rolodap.conf. I'll see about adding 
this at a later date. Until then make sure that your correct php binary is 
referenced.

sendmail.phtml would not run. In depth analysis showed it crashing on the 
ldapsearch call. I've no idea why it would crash. I've tried looking at the 
slapd debug output but have had no flashes of inspiration as yet. My interrim 
fix was to pass a list of email addresses rather than a list of uids from 
mailform.phtml to sendmail.phtml. This way the ldapsearch is unnecessary for 
determining the email addresses (and therefore commented out), however it 
means that placeholders do not work (ie using <firstname> or <homephone> in 
the email will not result in the actual data being mapped in - again this has 
been commented out). I'd like to get this fixed, but will have to put it on 
the back burner for now.

Finally support/smtp_mail.inc had a REALLY annoying bug and I had to monitor 
smtp traffic to find it. The MAIL FROM and RCPT TO commands had spaces before 
the colons (ie "MAIL FROM :" instead of the proper "MAIL FROM:"). Once fixed 
emails went out. I don't know if these ever worked, or if some mail servers 
could handle the error but both my ISP's exim server and my local postfix 
server got upset.

So, here are the files affected:-
mailform.phtml
startmailer.phtml - now redundant
sendmail.phtml - lots of functionality commented out
support/smtp_mail.inc - two minor but very annoying bugs fixed

While I'm here, other things I'd like to add to the email system are 
signatures (set up via user preferences) and perhaps a more fully featured 
html email editor. Perhaps we can integrate something like Ekit 
(http://www.hexidec.com/ekit.php). Anyone interested in doing these feel 
free, as I'll be working on an email audit trail for the next week or so.

Rather than mess around with patches I've attached new versions of the three 
updated files, since I don't think anyone else is looking at the email system 
at the moment.
All bug reports and fixes greatfully received, flames to /dev/null. ;-)

Regards,

Phil.

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