The Mailer Contrib allows users to "subscribe" to regularly scheduled e-mails containing either:
The central component of MailerContrib is a script, tools/mailnotify
, that generates and sends out the emails based on analysis of
cron
(or an equivalent off-line job scheduler), or from the command-line.
The script collates the changes emails so that each subscriber only receives one changes notification for all changes in all webs in the TWiki. Furthermore, users can elect to receive just summaries of changes, or the entire content of topics that have changed.
Each web can optionally contain a topic called WebNotify.
Users subscribe to email notifications using their WikiName or an alternative email address, and can specify the webs/topics they wish to track, Whole groups of users can also be subscribed for notification.
The general format of a subscription is:
three spaces *
subscriber [ :
topics ]
Where subscriber can be a WikiName, an E-mail address, or a group name. If subscriber contains any characters that are not legal in an email address, then it must be enclosed in 'single' or "double" quotes. Please note that the guest user TWikiGuest does not have an email address mapped to it, and will never receive email regardless of the configuration of that user.
topics is an optional space-separated list of topics:
*
in a topic name, where it is treated as a wildcard character*
will match zero or more other characters - so, for example, Fred*
will match all topic names starting with Fred
, *Fred
will match all topic names ending with Fred
, and *
will match all topic names.
Examples: Subscribe Daisy to all changes to topics in this web.
* daisy.cutter@flowers.comSubscribe Daisy to all changes to topics that start with
Web
.
* daisy.cutter@flowers.com : Web*Subscribe Daisy to changes to topics starting with
Petal
, and their immediate children, WeedKillers and children to a depth of 3, and all topics that match start with Pretty
and end with Flowers
e.g. PrettyPinkFlowers
* DaisyCutter: Petal* (1) WeedKillers (3) Pretty*FlowersSubscribe StarTrekFan to changes to all topics that start with
Star
except those that end in Wars
, sInTheirEyes
or shipTroopers
.
* StarTrekFan: Star* - *Wars - *sInTheirEyes - *shipTroopersSubscribe Daisy to the full content of NewsLetter whenever it has changed
* daisy@flowers.com: NewsLetter?Subscribe buttercup to NewsLetter and its immediate children, even if it hasn't changed.
* buttercup@flowers.com: NewsLetter! (1)Subscribe GardenGroup (which includes Petunia) to all changed topics under AllnewsLetters to a depth of 3. Then unsubscribe Petunia from the ManureNewsLetter, which she would normally get as a member of GardenGroup:
* GardenGroup: AllNewsLetters? (3) * petunia@flowers.com: - ManureNewsLetterSubscribe
IT:admins
(a non-TWiki group defined by a custom user mapping) to all changes to Web* topics.
* 'IT:admins' : Web*In addition to single quotes ('), double quotes (") do the same job for a non-TWiki group.
A user may be listed many times in the WebNotify topic. Where a user has several lines in WebNotify that all match the same topic, they will only be notified about changes that topic once (though they will still receive individual mails for news topics).
If a group is listed for notification, the group will be recursively expanded to the e-mail addresses of all members.
Warning: Because an email address is not linked to a user name, there is no way for TWiki to check access controls for subscribers identified by email addresses. A subscriber identified by an email address alone will only be sent change notifications if the topic they are subscribed to is readable by guest users. You can limit what email addresses can be used in WebNotify, or even block use of emails altogether, using the
{MailerContrib}{EmailFilterIn} setting in =configure
.
Tip: List names in alphabetical order to make it easier to find the names.
In the future it is intended that individual users will be able to control the frequency with which they are notified of topic changes, by changing a schedule specification in their home topic. However at present, the notification schedule is controlled by the frequency of activation of the cron
job that runs the mailnotify
script.
Note that when using the "news mode" !
or ?
specifiers the entire topic text is mailed out as HTML. The newsletter
template is used to generate the content in this mail, using whatever skin is selected in the topic being mailed.
In addition, the %STARTPUBLISH% and %STOPPUBLISH% markers used by TWiki:Plugins.PublishContrib to delimit the text to be published are respected in news mode.
The second part of the module is a code library that provides the services for other applications to modify the subscription topics through a clean, well documented API. This allows (for example) plugin developers to add (for example) a "Register me for this newsletter" button to their pages. Developers should refer to the POD documentation for the WebNotify class as their starting point.
This module is pre-installed. TWiki administrators can upgrade it as needed on the TWiki server.
MailerContrib.zip
in your twiki installation directory.
mailnotify
script from the command line, with no parameters. In this case it will print out what it would have done to STDOUT
.
You can change the regular expression that matches email addresses in WebNotify using the {MailerContrib}{EmailFilterIn}
setting in configure
. This allows you to limit the domains to which emails can be sent, or even block email addresses altogether.
As mentioned in the 'IT:admins'
example above, you can use custom user/group notations in WebNotify by surrounding them with single quotes (') or double quotes (").
But surrounding them in quotes is inconvenient especially because quotes are not needed for access control.
So you can set {MailerContrib}{CustomUserGroupNotations}
to a regular expression matching the custom notations in configure
.
If you do that, you don't need to put those into quotes.
If an error occurs with email sending, it reties.
By default, 5 tries happen before it gives up.
You can specify the max number of tries by setting {MailerContrib}{SendEmailTries}
.
You need to set up a cron
(or equivalent) job to run the tools/mailnotify
perl script.
The script is used as follows: perl -I bin mailnotify [-q] [-news] [ web1 web2 ... webN ]
bin | path to the TWiki bin directory, so that the script can find the rest of TWiki. |
-q |
Don't print progress information |
-news |
Run in "news mode" (process subscriptions that include "!" or "?" following the topic) |
web1 web2 ... webN |
List of webs to process, separated by spaces or commas. The default is to process all webs. Wildcards (*) are supported. |
/usr/local/twiki
, this cron entry:
0 0 * * * cd /usr/local/twiki && perl -I bin tools/mailnotify -q Public Privatewill generate change notifications for the
Public
and Private
webs every night at midnight. (Google for crontab
for more information on what all the 0 0 * * *
fields mean)
0 0 * * * cd /usr/local/twiki && perl -I bin tools/mailnotify -q -Sandboxwill generate change notifications for all webs, except the
Sandbox
web.
0 0 * * 0 cd /usr/local/twiki && perl -I bin tools/mailnotify -newswill generate newsletters from all webs every week on midnight Saturday.
Note: Multiple instances of mailnotify script are not allowed to be executed simultaneously. If you need to run the script multiple times with different options, make sure the cron jobs are scheduled so a previous run has finished before the next starts. You can also write a small script that runs mailnotify in sequence as described in TWiki:Support.DuplicateNotificationsFromMailerCon
.
The changes mails sent to subscribers are based on a TWiki template called mailnotify
. This template must contain the following definitions.
HTML:before |
Section of a HTML mail before the changes |
HTML:middle |
Repeated in a HTML mail for each change |
HTML:after |
Section of a HTML mail after the changes |
PLAIN:before |
Section of a plain text mail before the changes |
PLAIN:middle |
Repeated in a plain text mail for each changes |
PLAIN:after |
Section of a plain text mail after the changes |
MailNotifyBody |
All the above are embedded in this. %HTML_TEXT% expands to the HTML obtained by expanding the HTML:* templates, and %PLAIN_TEXT% from the PLAIN:* templates. |
The default template sends multipart mails containing both HTML and plaintext versions. You can easily provide a custom version of this template using a local skin.
Newsletters are sent after formatting using the standard view
template, using whatever skin is selected in the topic being mailed.
Many thanks to the following sponsors for supporting this work:
Author: | TWiki:Main.CrawfordCurrie![]() ![]() |
Copyright: | © 2004, Wind River Systems; © 2008, wikiring.com © 2004-2015 TWiki:TWiki.TWikiContributor ![]() |
License: | GPL (GNU General Public License![]() |
Version: | 2015-05-27 |
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03 Aug 2008 | TWiki 4.2.1 release version |
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11672 | Added newsletter support, after much harassment from TWiki:Main.LynnwoodBrown![]() |
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5269 | Minor doc fixes |
5266 | Doc tidy-ups, added filtering of _ webs, added obsolete lock script |
5264 | Changed default to add web name to user name (I hope) |
5263 | Minor doc tidyups |
5261 | Documentation changes, and fixed to scan all webs. |
5253 | runnable as CGI script, minor bugfixes, removed dependency on DBCacheContrib |
5234 | Minor doc changes |
5231 | Made a change an object, added unit tests to CVS, lots of testing. |
4 March 2005 | 1.010 Dakar release ready. |
12 Oct 2004 | 1.004 Added support for anti-subscriptions. Doc fixes from TWiki:Main.PeterThoeny![]() |
6 Oct 2004 | 1.003 Excluded _ webs from processing, added bin/remove_obsolete_locks for full reverse-compatibility |
1 Oct 2004 | 1.002 PeterThoeny provided additional documentation |
27 Sep 2004 | 1.001 runnable as CGI script, minor bugfixes, removed dependency on DBCacheContrib |
8 Sep 2004 | 1.000 Initial version |
Home: | http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/MailerContrib![]() |
Feedback: | http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/MailerContribDev![]() |
Appraisal: | http://TWiki.org/cgi-bin/view/Plugins/MailerContribAppraisal![]() |
Related Topics: TWikiPreferences, CustomUserGroupNotations