Searching through Kunena's Forum, there are quite a few posts about sending new posts to Mail Lists and Email Posting back to Kunena. I myself posted about this a back when the first version of Kunena was released. There is a Joomla extension with post via email to Kunena, but after looking at the reviews and the way it is set up, looks to be user specific. In otherwords, only available to one user, STMP, call functions to read incoming, lots of room for error without Python(brains behind mail list functions) integration. Mailman and the others all use the programming language of Python.
Since the developers added the ability for users to subscribe to Categories(WELL DONE!) and receive all posts within a Category, there is possibly an easy way to make this feature available
without the post back by email. This might be good enough for most. Would need to add a class, "Mail List Gateway" which would be similar to moderator and make it available as a setting in user control in the back end settings. This would mainly be a setting to determine the output of the message body.
How to integrate it:
Create a user for the forum, for example, "MailList" and use the email address(
This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
) for the Mail List you want to subscribe the Category or Categories to.
You will have to use Joomla's user menu if you have confirmation email set for registration.
Log into your Kunena forum with the new mail list user account, subscribe to the Category or Categories. Then log out.
Make sure your forum's email address is subscribed to the Mail List you are pushing your notifications to. Mailman has a whitelisting abillity allowing posts from certain emails, or you can subscribe your email manually and set the subscription for your forum's email address to "No emails" which will allow the post, but will not receive any posts.
I have already tried this and it works, however with a User Subscription, you get an email with a message body aimed towards a single user not a mail list. Current notice format reads like this:
Mail List,
A new post has been made to a topic to which you have subscribed on the Your Wesite's Name Forum
Message: Title of Topic
Posted by: TheUserWhoPostedIt
You can administer your subscriptions by following the Profile link on the forum home page after you have logged in on the site. From your profile you can go to Subscriptions tab where you can unsubscribe from the topic.
URL: The link to the post
Message:
.......
A better format could be:
This is a Name of your Website Forum Post that is gatewayed to this mailing list. Important Note: The author of this message may not be subscribed to this list! If you would like to reply to them, please click on the URL link below and respond to them on the forum.
Author: The UserWhoPostedIt
Category: cat name
Message: Title of post
URL: Link to the post
Message
Contents of the post..........
Format of the message body is the only reason why you would need a way to mark the username as a Mail List Gateway. We need a way to set the message body differences like they are between User and Moderator. Hint-Hint(custom notifications message bodies per user designation-perhaps 2.0) Suggestions if I'm missing something.
One of the pluses, you could point Guests to a mail list that receives all posts, or category specific posts. Lessen your mail server send load if you have a limitation on sent emails from a specific address. You could also use Google or Yahoo Groups as your mail list server. They have whitelisting ability from specific email addresses or no email settings.
Thoughts???
Tom