An email bridge is something that allows messages from Elgg, group discussion messages, direct message notifications etc, to be directly replied to from your email client.
I needed to get something like this implemented for a client project, and thankfully there was a third party open source plugin written by Michael Jett which did most of the work for me.
The Jettmail project is still under active development, and at time of writing was missing two key bits of functionality that I needed:
- Direct reply-to email functionality (you could send messages from an email link, but direct reply-to functionality was missing).
- Direct person to person message support.
I have made my own modifications to Jettmail to add this functionality, and also created a plugin to rewrite the reply-to email line appropriately for each object.
Great stuff. This all feels like it should be part of core or at least a “blessed” plugin. Poor email integration is the one reason we’ve been unable to drop Google Groups and consolidate all Elgg discussion/planning on the community site. I think we’re well on our way to fixing the notifications problem (all notifications currently go to a single thread in gmail!!), but closing the loop with reply-by-email is going to be a must-have before we can completely make the switch, I think.
I would love to see the incoming mail channel as part of the core notifications system. Have a router that provides a generic incoming email -> object mapping and allow objects/plugins handle what to do with the payload…
I also was playing with it:
https://github.com/lorea/elggman/tree/1.8
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Extended the Jettmail plugin and added inbound email support to Elgg.http://www.marcus-povey.co.uk/2013/08/15/reply-to-email-bridge-functionality-in-elgg/