[geeklog-devel] Emailing from Geeklog

[Dirk Haun]

You may (or may not) have seen an increase in reports where people are
having problems sending emails from Geeklog. Even if you eliminate those
that are simple setup problems, there seems to be an increasing trend for
ISPs to restrict or even disable sending of emails from PHP scripts.

Now, obviously it's not good when people can't get their registration email.

Looking at the code, you'll notice that currently Geeklog is using mail()
in several locations all over the code. Things like headers and
formatting of email adresses are also slightly different in all those
places, which has already led to situations where (on certain setups)
some of these functions worked and others did not.

So, the first thing would be to introduce a new function, say,
COM_mail(), that handles ALL the mail sent from Geeklog. Next, there
should be a way to override this function so that you can have your own
implementation in lib-custom.php (if need be) without having to hack the
core code.

Also, there should be a way to switch off all the email-related functions
in Geeklog and still have a fully working site. Obviously, that would
mean that we need a way for users to register with a site without having
to receive an email (which, of course, has a slightly higher risk of
being misused as if someone's identity is "confirmed" through an email).

Yet another issue involved here is that I was informed that the current
way we're sending email from Geeklog is causing problems for our users in
Japan. Yusuke Sakata, who also provides the Japanese translation, has a
patch on his website that I need to look at. We will probably want to
either include it or at least make it easier through the above-mentioned
method of letting a custom function override COM_mail().

Comments?

bye, Dirk


-- 
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