[pmwiki-users] RFC -- POP3 to PmWiki

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Wed, Oct 04, 2006 at 06:54:55PM -0400, Neil Herber wrote:
> At 2006-10-04  04:43 PM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud is rumored to have said:
> >In particular, I want
> >to be able to be able to send messages to pmwiki-users that
> >contain content to be posted to the wiki.
> 
> But looking at my audiences, I can see plenty of pitfalls in having a 
> generally available gateway:
> 1) most people use some form of HTML mail formatting which creates 
> horrendous looking pages

Yup.  But many mailers now provide both HTML and text versions in a
mail, and the mail-to-wiki gateway could certainly filter on mimetype
to prevent text/html messages from being posted.  (And I suspect
it's unlikely an html-formatted message would get sent anyway, unless
the (:post ...:) directives magically happened to occur at the
beginning of a line.)

> 2) mail clients handle things like inline graphics inconsistently, 
> which makes it difficult to parse out the desired text

I'd probably just strip any image tags -- the point of the 
gateway is for content to find its way onto the wiki, not to 
produce perfectly formatted pages from the email.

> 4) I am trying to get people to jointly edit pages, not just bottom 
> post to a page - for that I could use a bulletin board

Valid point.  In 2004 we originally thought of the mail-to-wiki
gateway because there was a lot of useful information on the
mailing list that wasn't finding its way onto the pmwiki.org site.
Having the gateway would make it easy for people (especially me)
to just say "throw this content up there -- someone can come back
and reformat it later".

Thanks!

Pm