Forum and List Synchronization

This page describes how to set up a Tiki forum such that all mails from the forum go to a mailing list, and all mails from that mailing list (assuming people respect the Reply-To header) go back to the forum. It preserves e-mail threading, even on posts to the forums!

Basic Setup

The portion of the forum administration page we are using looks like this:

The first option, "Forward messages to this forum...", you should set to the name of the mailing list that people will be subscribing to to see the messages in this forum. This is the forum-to-email part of the gateway.

Please note that using "Send this forums posts to this email" will not do the right thing, as the emails that that feature sends are not in the right format, nor sent from the right user.

The second option, "Originating e-mail address...", should be set to whatever full address the third part ends up corresponding to. Also for the forum-to-email part of the gateway, this is for the mailing list to have an identifier of who (the forum) is sending a message.

The third option, "Add messages from this email to the forum", should be set to the server, user and password of a POP3 account that is solely for receiving mail for this forum. This is for the email-to-forum part of the gateway. You should have this user (in the form user@domain) subscribed to the mailing list.

Tiki checks the mail server and gets new emails each time the forum is accessed.

Mailing List Setup

The tricky part is to avoid mail loops once this has all been set up, just FYI.

Here's how you are recommended to set up the mailing list.

Make the list be moderated, first of all, until you're sure that everything is working OK, and maybe even then. That's important to control the mail. Make the reply-to for the list be the list itself.

Have the user the comes from and goes to (wikidiscuss(at)lojban.org in the example above) subscribed to the list, with its posts having pre-approve status (so they don't need to be moderated). This means that new posts to the list will go to the forums, as they end up being sent to this user.