Re: 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. 

Not sure what your mean.  IMAP doesn't really have anything to do with
OGo, that is just whatever IMAP server (hopefully Cyrus) is in the
backend.

> 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. 

Often not 'wise' diversity (witness the number of people who think TB is
a great client, ugh!) but true.

> 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),  

Yep. AFAIK, every major client now supports GroupDAV. (?)

> 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. 

Interesting, I've thought about this before.

> 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. 

Yea, the mailist support in OGo WebUI, is IMHO, pretty much a hack.

> 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.  

Did you test this?  If it sends it all as one message the MTA should
deal with this (compress the recipients, and most mailstores suppress
duplicate deliveries anyway).   But maybe I recall that OGo's mailist
thingy sends and individual message to each recipient.

> I see that the zOGI interface to OGO does not deal with mail, whilst the 
> old xml-rpc interface does. 

Sort of.  Does the old xml-rpcd's mail API even work?  It is really darn
ugly.  The latest versions of zOGI do have the beginnings of mail
support; at least for sending.  So adding something more isn't out of
the question.

>  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).

No, the expressed goal of zOGI is to support/expose *ALL* of the
server's functionality.  Of course it isn't there yet.  Another
[unspoken] goal is to allow clients to communicate via HTTP with the OGo
server and require *NO* other connections (as sometimes anything beyond
HTTP is hard to get allowed).  So adding some degree of mail support is
inevitable.

> 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. 

If that is true it is an 'unintended feature'.  Teams should only
contain accounts.

>  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. 

Seems reasonable although the server might be able to help.  Look at the
code for the getNotifications API method.
 
> 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. 

Hmm.  That is probably a feature specific to the WebUI's mail client.

> 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.

Yep, my bug!

> 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.

It seems reasonable, and not terribly hard, to create a new entity:
Group -that can contain contacts & enterprises.

> 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). 

Correct, on that level the groups need to be supported by the MTA.  But
that I think is really trivial (at least if your MTA is Postfix).
Delivery is probably best handled by the MTA anyway for a variety of
reasons.

> 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. 
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