> * A way of sending emails to XWiki so they can be stored, archived and
> referenced from a wiki page.
Yep, I remember some talking about this.
BTW I wonder if XWiki Watch could be used for this? We'd just need to
hook a mailbox + a POP module (or a mailing list archive reader) and
it should work just fine I think.
I'm not sure this is the most relevant way to do it.
I don't agree. What you have in mind is a simple email storage/search facility. However leverage watch we get much more:
* The ability to tag/filter interesting mails. Since the problem with mails is that the information is scattered a bit everywhere, I think it's useful to be able to say that such email is flagged as containing interesting information for example.
* The ability to reuse an existing interface with all its niceness
* Emails are just a source of information. I recall Ludovic saying that Watch was designed to allow different input sources. For example for AFP we had discussed using Watch to read their existing documents and presenting them in Watch.
* The Watch Email plugin would be easily plugged onto a mailing list (by having a watch user subscribed to the list for example). Another plugin would be one that plugs on the email list manager (and thus can request past emails, etc).
* When Watch gets new features added our email feature also gets features added automatically.
* Watch can be seen as a generic tool for managing information source feeds.
Indeed. In the end, Watch is a tool that basically allows for collaborative filtering of any kind of information as long as it can get in under the form of ordered items (articles, messages, posts...).
My point was not so much that Watch cannot do email management (I'm convinced that it could indeed bring a lot of value to the process of email filtering, for instance by allowing a team of salespeople to filter & classify incoming contact mails), but rather than its features set might be an overkill for people with basic email archiving needs.
There's another option. Create a forum application to manage mails in the same as Jive is doing it with their forum:
They also support plugging in their forum onto an existing mailing list which is great.
Since the way a forum works is very similar to the way a mailing list does, this can be an interesting idea too : let users post from either the forum & the mailing list, and have emails automatically generate forum entries & forum entries being sent as emails to the list. In the end the user doesn't care where to post from, like what Nabble offers
IMO going the Watch route would be a good thing to try as a POC or as a GSOC since it shouldn't be too hard to do.
+1 for making this a PoC / GSoC project.
As for how to do all this, I think Anca proposed a sound way to do it :
"As for directly reading a mailbox and a mail archive, here's how we could
do it: apart from the feed reader plugin, we can have a mailreader plugin
to handle this job (and just the same, a lot of other reader plugins to
handle various types of content). It seems the right way of adding extra
content fetching powers to Watch so this is, in the end, not a Watch
specific job but more like a plugins one."
-> We could write a mail plugin (in fact I think there's already some kind of a mail API in XWiki, coming from the mail-1.4.jar plugin, but we could also use something like James ->
http://james.apache.org/) that would receive email and then process it towards either Watch, the Forum or any other application (maybe using something such as this :
http://james.apache.org/mailet/index.html), to allow for maximum flexibility.
[snip]
Guillaume