Bridgy from and to email lists

[tantek]

Summary: Use Bridgy to either/both:
(1) POSSE an indieweb post to an email list, and/or
(2) receive webmentions to the original post when people reply to the POSSE copy on the mailing list.

Feel free to split into sub-issues.

Details:

How to POSSE an indieweb post to an email list:
http://indiewebcamp.com/email_list#POSSE_to_an_email_list

How Bridgy could send webmentions whenever someone replies in email on the list to the email POSSE copy of an indieweb post:
http://indiewebcamp.com/email_list#Bridgy_webmentions_for_replies

How Bridgy Publish could POSSE an indieweb reply to an email by sending an email in reply (e.g. to an email list)
http://indiewebcamp.com/email_list#Bridgy_publishing_of_replies_to_email

cc: @aaronpk @npdoty

[snarfed]

thanks for filing this, @tantek. such an awesome idea!

[kylewm]

continuing discussion from IRC:

(12:30:44 PM) kylewm: tantek: is there anything bridgy-specific in any of the "to and from email" propsal. is there any way in which bridgy is better suited to do it than some new service?

(12:31:27 PM) tantek: kylewm: yes - bridgy already has a structure for creating permalink stubs with microformats that provide the info that webmention consumers want
(12:32:24 PM) tantek: that's on the backfeed side
(12:32:45 PM) tantek: and on the POSSE side, Bridgy Publish also has a UI and user flow already for entering in a post permalink that you want POSSEd to another destination

My 2¢, this would definitely be a cool Bridgy feature, but the overlaps with existing Bridgy functionality are pretty small — it feels like a separate service (or just a library) to me.

Creating permalink stubs with microformats is relatively easy; anybody who generates reply context for silo posts does it already.

Bridgy's user flow for publishing is nice, I'll give you that one :)

[npdoty]

I'd be more interested in the use of Bridgy to scan for/gather replies, create permalink/stubs for them and generate webmentions back to my site (rather than the publishing flow). I'm not sure it would be an easy feature to build, but in theory I could tell Bridgy, please watch these mailing lists for replies to a particular message id, or potentially even please watch this mailing list for any messages that refer to a URL on my domain, or any messages in reply to a message that has an Archived-At header with a URL on my domain.

If the mailing list were Mailman (or maybe some other common providers) run, then Bridgy could handle polling by subscribing to it in an automated way and then parsing messages whenever they were received. That sounds similar to the tech that Bridgy already has for polling/streaming social media silos.

Personally, I wouldn't want to export the email sending part to an external service (like Bridgy). Formatting needs to be just right; many lists have separate approval mechanisms before you can send to them; the service would have to handle From/on-behalf-of/approved sender stuff which can be very complex. (On the other hand, it would make it easy for Bridgy to know exactly which messages to find replies to.)

[snarfed]

fwiw app engine has an email service, so i wouldn't need to handle email deliverability. (which, yeah, there's no way in hell. :P) cc @tantek

[tantek]

Hmm - answering my own question, this should probably be split into a Bridgy Publish feature request to POSSE to email, and Bridgy backfeed feature request to handle replies on a particular mailing list (make user/site have to sign-up on Bridgy per mailing list to backfeed from possibly.)

What's your preference @snarfed? Should this stay a meta-issue about Bridgy and email (creating sub-issues for each of the above)? Or morph this issue into one of those and create a new issue for the other?

[aaronpk]

The trick with getting Bridgy to send email on your behalf is you'd have to add DKIM/SPF rules on your domain to allow Bridgy to send email for you. For example, to even allow Gmail to send email for parecki.com, I had to add this DNS record: v=spf1 include:aspmx.googlemail.com a ~all. Amazon SES has some similar configuration. Bridgy would need to provide instructions for setting up app engine's DNS records on your domain in order for its emails to not be flagged as spam immediately.

[snarfed]

@aaronpk oh boy, literally sending email from your personal address? yeah, you're right, and i wouldn't even expect to try that for the first pass at this. good reminder for if we ever do tackle that though!

@tantek i don't feel strongly about one vs two issues for publish vs backfeed. if/when someone actually starts on this, they can manage the issue(s) however they like. until then, no need to proliferate issues beyond this one.

[snarfed]

if anyone's interested in tackling this, i've written up comprehensive instructions on how to add a new silo to bridgy. feel free to jump in!

[snarfed]

@npdoty's personal version of this is pretty cool! http://bcc.npdoty.name/