Question Migrating a community from mail lists to Kumena

I've worked with Fireboard for a while, and my knowledge of Kumena is limited.

Does anyone have any thoughts regarding tools or processes allowing a community of "mail list" users to migrate from the email list to Kumena?

Some folks are rather enamored with the mail list. I take that to mean they like having all the discussion messages delivered to their email Inbox and have the ability to "Reply" to the list and/or the original poster of the message. This list has been around for many years.


Of course, there are advantages and disadvantages between forums and maillists, and I don't want to open that discussion.

Instead, I'm wondering if there might be a way to have a forum act as a real forum, yet generate emails when postings are made, then add postings when emails are received.


This would allow folks enamored with the list to keep the list, and others to use just the standard forum.

Thoughts?

Hi,

You can automatically have emails generated for any thread a user is subscribed to, but currently not more. You cannot respond to those via email. This would require quite some coding.

Sorry about that!

I found this brief thread via search. This is such a needed utility. It would be phenomenal to have Kunena, either natively or via an extension, be able to send posts to a maillist and then have the maillist posts inserted into the appropriate forum threads.

Does anyone know of such a project or utility?

K

Since this topic started there has been a lot of discussion about Kunena despatching mass e-mails, notices of every post that appears on the message boards, periodic summary digests, etc., etc. See [Merged Topic] Automatically subscribe all members to be notified of any new messages .

There has also been some movement to allow users to subscribe to more than just a single thread (fxstein mentioned this his response, earlier). K 1.6 allows users to subscribe to a category of discussions, to be kept informed by e-mail whenever there's a new message posted within the forum category (or categories) that users have subscribed themselves to ... not just to subscribe only to individual threads.

I think these ideas, that I have just mentioned, were very similar to the concepts envisaged when this discussion started 7 months ago.

On the matter of providing some mechanism to permit users to reply via e-mail, this too has been discussed (although, without any conclusions or agreement being reached). See

• Autocreate new Message from email account...
• Email posts to forum?
• Email posts to forum
• Request: Email List to Forum Post
• Submit forms directly into Kunena posts?

As you can see, this idea has been kicked around for a long time but there does not seem to be the strong pressure to develop such features into the Kunena project. If people want these kinds of things they really need to make a lot more noise than they have been making (or, you'll need to pay someone to develop these features for you).

However, these two issues seem to have been drawn together:

kssocial wrote: ... to have Kunena ... send posts to a maillist (subscriptions?) and ... have the maillist posts (email-to-forum?) inserted into the appropriate forum threads.

Can you confirm that my understanding of the question (highlighted in blue above) is correct, please? :dry:

Your interpretation is precisely on point. I'm not surprised that this has not been requested more frequently. One thing that I've noticed since switching from Agora to Kunena is that most who inhabit this forum are the more technically challenged users. It seems logical that the more advanced don't require the extensive support. Those people are also likely to be more able to make needed coding changes to their extensions.

Here is why I am needing this type of functionality. One of my sites I started for musicians. It is a private site and has musicians from around the world who are members. Most of us are also members of a long standing maillist for musicians. I only have a very few topics available no the website because there are a few of the musicians who are blind and use text to speech utilities in order to take part in the maillist. Because of navigation and other issues it becomes overly difficult for those members to be able to use a forum situation which is why we keep the maillist going. If we had the ability to post to a forum and have that post go out to a maillist and for responses to be posted to the forum it would allow the sight challenged to continue to use email without missing out on the forum activities and for the sighted members to have a more complete discussion utility.

I think that with the web as ubiquitous as it is that being aware of and providing a means for those with challenges is a good idea and a growing need. I don' know how much work would be required, it might be more than I envision but it may also not take that much change to send out an email since that part is already done, but it would take some work to receive an email and be able to place it in the correct thread but that should be doable by having the thread name in a header and then reading the header for incoming mail to know which thread to place the post into.

Just some ideas to think about (or maybe just be tossed). Thanks for the response.

K