Mailsender

Purpose

Mailsender is intended as a drop-in replacement for Mailtool but with a slightly different approach. While general functionality is the same, some items have been removed to help with source maintenance and to enhance the user experience. Permissions and tool ID from mailtool are preserved in Mailsender to help as a drop-in replacement.

Differences from Mailtool

• Implemented using RSF. The original JSF implementation made several full cycle calls back to the server when performing even simple tasks such as selecting a checkbox or clicking a link to show more recipients within a group. This has been changed to use AJAX to show the recipients in the groups without refreshing the screen.
• Lazy loading of recipients. The initial screen is minimal is quick to load. To build the screen up after the initial page load, AJAX is used to retrieve data from the server and is cached locally. Subsequent calls for previously retried data will refer to the local cache. This will help users that suffer from long page loads as a result of a large list of possible recipients.
• Fewer recipient selection views. Rather than having 3+ views to change between for selecting recipients, Mailsender has one view that strives to be a "best of" sampling from previous views along with new features that bring forward the design of the interface. The new interface uses Roles, Sections, and Groups as selection starting points.
• 2 email service options. The previous built-in email service is still available and enabled by default. There is now the option, through Maven profile selection, to discard this email service and leverage the external Sakai email service. The Sakai email service has been updated to provide the previously missing functionality that prompted the Mailtool developers to build in an email service. By using Maven profiles, the project is able to build either implementation and not suffer build failures if a newer version of the Sakai email service is unavailable. The built-in email service will stay the default until the newer Sakai email service becomes more prevalent in future Sakai releases.

Source

• The source has been committed to contrib: https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/gatech/mailsender/.
• There are legacy builds that were strictly conversions from JSF to RSF. No changes were made to the email service. These can be found under https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/gatech/mailsender/tags/legacy-*.
• The latest stable release as of 2 July 2009 is https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/gatech/mailsender/tags/1.4.2.
• trunk will stay as stable as possible. Code changes will be performed in branches and trunk will follow the most up to date stable tag.

Building

Building is controlled through Maven profiles of where there are 2: intms, extms. DO NOT build with both profiles at the same time.

• intms (Internal mail service) [default] - This profile yields artifacts that contain the original built-in email service. This profile has no dependency on the external mail service and is intended for all versions of Sakai.

  mvn install

  or to be explicit

  mvn install -P intms

• extms (External mail service) - This profile yields artifacts that build and depend on an updated Sakai email service that includes functionality for including attachments on messages. This profile is intended for newer releases of Sakai (2.6+/k1).

  mvn install -P extms