shared mailing groups

I had originally envisaged users employing which ever mail client they 
preferred, with the client simply using IMAP to interact with the OGO 
server.  Since there are a wide variety of email clients in use, it seems 
that there is more diversity of preference among users with regard to this 
than with any other application. 

The main problem with users using a range of email applications is that 
contact information is duplicated (unless I produce the means to reconcile 
the address books of different email clients with OGO contacts e.g. using 
vCard),  Another problem with a diversity of email clients is that mailing 
groups cannot be shared.  Furthermore, it means I can't offer the same 
degree of technical support for so many mail clients, as I could for a 
single mail client.

As part of my attempt to decide what to do, I'm wondering what would be 
involved in implementing shared 'mailing groups' based on OGO contact 
data. 

Looking at the web interface to OGO, I see that there are mailing lists 
that can be created, but these seem not to be sharable.  Moreover, if the 
same email address was found on multiple lists, then that email address 
received multiple copies of the email sent to the lists.  This would seem 
to me to be undesirable behaviour - I would want to resolve the lists of 
recipients so that if an address is found on more than one list, that 
address would still only receive one copy of the email.

I see that the zOGI interface to OGO does not deal with mail, whilst the 
old xml-rpc interface does.  For the moment, I'm prepared to just use the 
old interface for sending mail (at some point further down the line, maybe 
I'll look at adding mail to the zOGI interface, unless that's something 
that zOGI is designed not to do).  From the zOGI interface, it does appear 
that Teams can contain Contacts (and not just Accounts), so I'm assuming 
that Teams would serve as a good basis for mailing groups.  My idea would 
be to extract the Contact details from the Team, resolve unique email 
addresses locally, populate the xml-rpc Mail object with the details, and 
send the email through the OGO server via that old interface. 
 
However, I think I may have misunderstood the nature of the Contacts who 
are in Teams.  I searched the OpenGroupware mailing list archive and found 
this post (http://www.nabble.com/Team-Mailing-List-td4017149.html#a4017149
) that shows that an email sent to a team will be delivered to each of the 
team members if the team has no collective email address configured. 
However, in the web UI, teams can only be made up of Accounts.  This leads 
me to believe that my understanding of the zOGI interface to Teams is 
mistaken.

I'd be grateful to hear what others think about this, and what you do in 
regard to mailing groups.    I can see that what I'm trying to do maybe 
falls between what zOGI is designed to do, and what the OGO web interface 
is designed to do.

A further problem I foresee is giving users access via Funambol -- this 
would also mean that they are using the local email client of the phone, 
and thus will lose the shared mailing groups (although it's great that 
Funambol can take care of the synchronization of contact data).  Which 
ever way I look at this, I can't seem to find an obvious solution.  Maybe 
I should just go back to the idea of not providing an email client.  That 
way at least they wouldn't expect to have shared mailing groups on their 
phones. 

Regards,

Bernard
-- 
OpenGroupware.org XML-RPC
[email protected]
http://mail.opengroupware.org/mailman/listinfo/xmlrpc