Question

I am not sure if I’m calling this correctly by the right name, what I would like to find (if it exists) is a group mailing list app (like mailman) but in php.

Here is what I expect it to do:

Allow for users to email [e-mail]
with subject like TEAM123 - Deadline is 11/30/2011 (or maybe just [e-mail])
and this application would CHECK the mailbox

It would check the mailbox, and forward that message to all users in TEAM123. So the email thread would then be created.

Users then would be notified in TEAM123, and by replying, would update the mail thread (the emails would then again go out to everyone). Maybe at this point the app would update a running conversation on the site (store it in DB? etc).

I think I’m calling the process properly ‘mailing list service’ etc..

Anyone aware of anything like this in PHP? I would use this for a sports league, players would just have to update via email and the whole team would be updated.

Thanks! Appreciate any ideas on this…

Answer 1

I’ve actually written some internal software that does this. I believe the term you’re looking for is ‘discussion list’ (as opposed to ‘announcement list’). The reason I ended up writing it on my own is because – to my knowledge – a well known software package doesn’t exist.

Announcement list – plenty. Discussion lists – no so much.

As an aside, the reason there’s not much out there may be because a forum is a much better tool to use. The well known discussion list software has been around for years, developed when people had e-mail addresses, but not always web access.

I’ll disagree with Rudism, in that a cron job or a special SMTP server is not needed. Postfix can be rather easily configured to send incoming e-mails to a PHP script, which then processes the mail.

Libraries like Zend_Mail, SwiftMailer make sending email easy. In my experience the hardest part is processing incoming e-mails. However, the popular e-mail libraries have made some progress in that direction (from what I’ve seen).

My recommendation is use a discussion list service, or a forum (maybe with e-mail notification). If you are set on running your own server, you could write a bare-bones script pretty easily.