Liferay's Forums Integration with Mailing Lists

I spent a fair amount of time yesterday afternoon digging deeper into Liferay's forums (Message Boards) and mailing lists.  It turns out that the mailing list option available through the edit interface associated with each category is intended to be used with true mailing lists as opposed to regular email accounts.

See http://www.liferay.com/web/thiago.moreira/blog/-/blogs/mailing-list-feature-on-message-boards-portlet

Just so everyone is on the same page, the lyrix listserver lists are mailing lists.  Google groups also provide mailing lists.

Configuration

Liferay's integration of mailing lists within forums can be summarized as:

1. Enabling the mailing list capability by checking "Active" under the "Mailing List" section of the category edit screen.
2. The email address found under "Mailing List" is intended to be the mailing list address (e.g., 'awipsinfo').
3. The "Incoming" section of the configuration defines an email account that Liferay will use to query and when emails are found within this account they will be processed and inserted into the forum.   The intention on Liferay's part is that there is a dedicated email address that is subscribed to the mailing list specified in step 2.
4. The "Outgoing" section in combination with the "Mailing List" defined in step 2 are used to send an email to the mailing list (e.g., 'awipsinfo') any time a new forum post is created - either via a processed email or natively within the Web interface.
5. Additionally any user subscribed to the category will be notified of new posts through an email with the sender being the "Name" and "Address" as defined in the "Email From" section of the forums configuration.

Testing

I ran some tests by creating a "Testing With Mailing List" category within the VLST and hooked it up to a test Google Group I created a couple of years ago called NWS Virtual Lab.  I used a test gmail account to subscribe to the NWS Virtual Lab google group mailing list and configured this account as the "incoming" account. 

Forum/Mailing List Behavior

I was able to confirm the following using this test:

1. Emails posted to the NWS Virtual Lab mailing list by VLST members were posted to the forum as the right user.
2. Emails posted to the NWS Virtual Lab mailing list by non-VLST/VLab members were not posted to the forum unless the "Allow Anonymous Emails" check box is selected under the "Mailing List" configuration within the VLab forums.
3. If the "Allow Anonymous Emails" checkbox is checked non members postings to the mailing list show up in the forum but as "Anonymous".
4. Postings directly entered into the forum are sent to the mailing list as the user configured in the "Outgoing" section as described in step 4. 

Where to go from here?

Status Quo

We can continue to use the forums with dedicated email as we are today, but with the understanding that we need to filter out any emails being posted to the forums as a result of the mailing list capability (e.g., outboud emails sent to the dedicated email account any time a message is posted).  Otherwise it is possible that duplicate entries will be received.  I have added filters to the vlst.vlab@noaa.gov, vlst.endoftourreport@noaa.gov, awips-installations@noaa.gov, and the national.blend.feedback@noaa.gov accounts to prevent these duplicates.

Integration with Lyrix Listserver Accounts?

Another option is to create forum categories within some of the communities (e.g., AWIPS) and map these to existing or newly created Lyrix listserver accounts (e.g., awips2dev, awipsinfo).  The benefit of doing so would be that moving forward these forums would capture the activity from the listservers within the VLab community forums, thus allowing users to find potentially valuable information within the forums.  This should be very easy to setup and would only require creation of a new email account for each listserver and then get this account subscribed to the listserver.  The downside is that we are dependent upon the lyrix listserver, which costs some amount of money to keep running and has had issues from time to time.

If we want to pursue this we should do so within the VLST or a testing community to make sure that everything looks okay after further testing.  We should make sure that the threads are correctly identified within the forums.

Investigate the Use of Google Groups?

Another option, similar to the one above, is to rely upon Google Groups rather than Lyrix for the mailing list capability.  It appears that NOAA does have some Google Groups, but I haven't seen any indication that the mailing list capability is being used.  We could check with the NOAA CIO to see if there are plans to implement this capability.

Investigate Hosting an Open Source Mailing List Solution?

Perhaps host Mailman?

Investigate Adding New Capablities to Forums?

Another alternative is to look into adding features to the existing Liferay forums:

1. Digest emails
2. subscribe, unsubscribe via email
3. Auto-subscribe new members
4. Handling of attachments within emails
5. Handling of html formatting within email

Thoughs? Questions?

Ken