General

Education

Juris Doctor — University of Connecticut School of Law, West Hartford, Connecticut, May 1982.

Bachelor of Arts - Political Science — The George Washington University, Washington, D.C., January 1970.

Considering the number of modules needed to create a mailing list system, it is risky, and perhaps a misnomer, to offer a "quick setup" guide. But for Drupal developers and users familiar with the modules involved, it might be helpful to have an idea of the workflow involved.

Add the infrastructure:

1. Go to Notifications>Main
2. If you want the person who posted a message to receive a copy of it check Notify poster of own posts. Some mailing lists do this, others do not. I have found that some posters, if they don't receive an email think the post never got there and complain.
3. If you check the Immediate sending box, when a new email comes in and creates a node subscribers will receive notifications immediately. If this box is unchecked the outgoing emails will be sent on the next cron cycle. On a site with a large amount of traffic sending immediately may cause the server to slow down.
4. Choose the appropriate radio button under Notifications sender. Selecting the third, Full user data, passes all information needed to format outgoing messages using messaging templates.
5. Select the appropriate Default send interval. This setting determins which sending interval will appear as the default when new subscriptions are created. This will make more sense after we set the subscription intervals. It has no relationship to the Immediate sending checkbox.
6. Go to Notifications>Events

Up to this point you have been setting up how your website will receive emails and turn them into content and comments. Now we're going to turn to how that content and associated comments are distributed to subscribers. The main modules you will use are Messaging and Notifications, and their subsidiary modules.

If you use PHPMailer, rather than Drupal Mail to send messages you must fix a bug in the messaging_phpmailer.module file to ensure that the reply-to address is set properly in outgoing. Find the following code:

  if (!empty($replyto['name']) && !empty($replyto['email'])) {

    $mail->AddReplyTo($replyto['email'], $replyto['name']);

  }

Replace it with:

if(!empty($message['headers']['Reply-To'])) {

    $mail->AddReplyTo($message['headers']['Reply-To']);

  }

You will need two new input formats, one for processing nodes created from emails and a second for processing comments. Remember, input formats are applied at the time of creation, and probably will need to strip out code, headers and signatures from emails so the content posted on the site is easily readable.

There is a Mailhandler input filter that will strip out headers and signatures. Most commonly, a signature begins with the signature separator "-- " (hyphen hyphen space) if you are using Thunderbird, Outlook or another email reader. Those programs do not by default insert a signature separator in emails created by clicking Reply-to sender or Reply-to all, even if you include a signature in replies. This is because some people choose to put the reply above the quoted original message and some put the reply below the quoted message.

1. Go to Site Building>Feed Importers>List.
2. Clone the Mailhandler comments importer
3. Fill in the Name field, i.e. Listmaster. If your name includes spaces and/or upper-case characters click the Edit link and give the feed importer a machine-readable name.
4. Follow steps 4 to 12 from the topic on creating a group mailbox.
5. Set Default commands appropriately. You may only need to set status: 0/1. Be careful here. For some reason the numbers are reversed for comments (status: 0 = published, status: 1 = requires approval).
6. Click Save.
7. Under the Processor click the Settings link.
8. Follow steps 17 to 21 under the topic about creating a group feed importer.
9. In the Input format dropdown select the input format for processing comments created from incoming emails.
10. Next, under Processer, select Mapping.

1. Go to Site Building>Feed Importers>List.
2. Clone the Mailhandler nodes importer
3. Fill in the Name field, i.e. Group1. If your name includes spaces and/or upper-case characters click the Edit link and give the feed importer a machine-readable name.
4. Fill in the Description field and click Create.
5. Under Basic settings click the Settings link.
6. If you want to fetch new messages every cron cycle, change Minimum refresh period to As often as possible. If not, choose the appropriate interval
7. Import on submission should be checked by default.
8. Click Save.
9. Under Parser, click the settings link.
10. In the Command plugins box Header processor and Default commands processor should be selected by default. If you will allow file uploading, select Files processor as well.
11. Under Authentication plugin select “From” address authentication. If you installed the Multiple Emal Addresses module, select Multiple Email Authentication.

1. Add another mailbox and give it the title Listmaster and email address listmaster@example.com.
2. All other settings are the same as the ones for the group mailbox.

1. Go to Site Building>Mailhandler Mailboxes>Add Mailbox.
2. In the Administrative title box put the name of the list, i.e. Group1.
3. Click the edit link and put the the machine-readable name in the field that becomes visible, i.e. group1. Over time the labels on these fields have changed, and they may not accurately reflect their purposes.
4. The Folder is INBOX, or some other name, depending on your mail sever.
5. Change the mailbox type to IMAP.
6. The mailbox domain is example.com and the port is 143 for standard IMAP.
7. The mailbox user name is what you use to log into the account, often the email address, i.e. group1@example.com. The password is the password you gave the user (Note that this password is visible, so do not use one that would give access to other stuff).
8. In the Extra Commands box type /novalidate-cert/tls, or whatever your mail server requires.
9. After this point you should see a message that Mailhandler successfully connected to the mailbox and the number of messages in the box.

1. Create a user with the same name as the group, i.e. Group1 is the user associated with the Group1 group and mailing list.
2. The user’s email address will be group1@example.com.
3. Create a mailbox on your mail server for Group1.
4. Make the user a group member with permission to post to the list, but give it no other role (all active users have the role Authorized User, but disregard that).
5. Give the user a password that is not terribly important because it will be visible on forms (not encrypted) in Mailhandler.
6. Save the user record.
7. If this group will be moderated; if messages posted to the group must be approved for publication; create another user called Group1.moderator, i.e. group1.moderator.
8. Give it the email address group1.moderator@example.com.
9. Follow the same steps to complete setup of this user and save the record.
10. Create a mailbox on the mail server for this user.