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Mailer Contrib
Send e-mail notification of changes to topics in TWiki webs
Introduction
The Mailer Contrib allows users to "subscribe" to regularly scheduled e-mails containing either:
- A report on changes to all topics that have changed within a particular TWiki web.
- A report on changes to a specific topic or set of topics the user can define flexibly.
- The entire content of a specific topic or set of topics. This is referred to as "news mode."
- The companion plugin (TWiki:Plugins.SubscribePlugin
 ) lets you trivially add a "Subscribe to changes" button to topics
tools/mailnotify
The central component of MailerContrib is a script, tools/mailnotify, that generates and sends out the emails based on analysis of
- users' subcriptions listed in the WebNotify topic in each web, and
- changes within the respective webs.
This script is designed to be run from 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:
- ... without a Web. prefix
- ...that exist in this web.
Users may further customize the specific content they will receive using the following controls:
- Using wild-card character in topic names - You can use
* in a topic name, where it is treated as a wildcard character. A * 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.
- Unsubscribing to specific topics - Each topic may optionally be preceded by a '+' or '-' sign. The '+' sign means "subscribe to this topic". The '-' sign means "unsubscribe" or "don't send notifications regarding this particular topic". This allows users to elect to filter out certain topics. Topic filters ('-') take precedence over topic includes ('+') i.e. if you unsubscribe from a topic it will cancel out any subscriptions to that topic.
- Including child-topics in subscription - Each topic may optionally be followed by an integer in parentheses, indicating the depth of the tree of children below that topic. Changes in all these children will be detected and reported along with changes to the topic itself. Note This uses the TWiki "Topic parent" feature.
- Subscribing to entire topic ("news mode") - Each topic may optionally be immediately followed by an exclamation mark ! and/or a question mark ? with no intervening spaces, indicating that the topic (and children if there is a tree depth specifier as well) should be mailed out as complete topics instead of change summaries. ! causes the full topic to be mailed every time even if there have been no changes, and ? will mail the full topic only if there have been changes. One can limit the content of the subscribed topic to send out by inserting %STARTPUBLISH% and %STOPPUBLISH% markers within the topic. Note that "news mode" subscriptions require a corresponding cron job that includes the "-news" option (see details).
Examples:
Subscribe Daisy to all changes to topics in this web.
* daisy.cutter@flowers.com
Subscribe 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*Flowers
Subscribe StarTrekFan to changes to all topics that start with Star except those that end in Wars, sInTheirEyes or shipTroopers.
* StarTrekFan: Star* - *Wars - *sInTheirEyes - *shipTroopers
Subscribe 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: - ManureNewsLetter
Subscribe 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.
TWiki/Contrib/MailerContrib code library
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.
Installation Instructions
This module is pre-installed. TWiki administrators can upgrade it as needed on the TWiki server.
- For an automated installation, run the configure script and follow "Find More Extensions" in the in the Extensions section.
- Or, follow these manual installation steps:
- Download the ZIP file from the extension home on twiki.org (see below).
- Unzip
MailerContrib.zip in your twiki installation directory.
- Set the ownership of the extracted directories and files to the webserver user.
- Install the dependencies (if any).
- To make sure the installation was successful, run the
mailnotify script from the command line, with no parameters. In this case it will print out what it would have done to STDOUT.
Additional settings
Restricting email addresses
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.
Custom user/group notations without quotes
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.
Email sending retries
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}.
Setting up your cron job(s)
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. |
For example, assuming TWiki was installed at /usr/local/twiki, this cron entry:
0 0 * * * cd /usr/local/twiki && perl -I bin tools/mailnotify -q Public Private
will 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 -Sandbox
will generate change notifications for all webs, except the Sandbox web.
0 0 * * 0 cd /usr/local/twiki && perl -I bin tools/mailnotify -news
will 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.
Developer Notes
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.
Contrib Info
Many thanks to the following sponsors for supporting this work:
| 2018-07-10: |
TWikibug:Item7841: Copyright update to 2018 |
| 2017-12-21: |
TWikibug:Item7830: Fixed link to page author in notification template |
| 2016-01-09: |
TWikibug:Item7708: Copyright update to 2016 |
| 2015-05-27: |
TWikibug:Item7604: Switch from GPL v2 to v3 |
| 2014-10-01: |
TWikibug:Item7559: mailnotify showing subscribers of a web wrong -- fixed |
| 2013-05-02: |
TWikibug:Item7248: TWiki::Contrib::MailerContrib::_processWeb() to set $twiki->{webName} |
| 2013-04-26: |
TWikibug:Item7245: Allowing a custom user/group notation in WebNotify without quotes |
| 2013-02-15: |
TWikibug:Item7123: Use TWISTY in installation instructions and change history |
| 2012-12-08: |
TWikibug:Item6962: Configure change: Move contrib settings from top level section to Extensions section -- TWiki:Main.PeterThoeny |
| 2012-01-13: |
TWikibug:Item6796: Fixing copyright year to 2012 |
| 2011-11-07: |
TWikibug:Item6799: Doc & typo fixes |
| 2011-07-08: |
TWikibug:Item6725: Change global package variables from "use vars" to "our" -- TWiki:Main.PeterThoeny |
| 2010-07-09: |
TWikibug:Item6518: Fix for notification e-mail showing %MAKETEXT{"Web"} in subject |
| 2010-06-12: |
TWikibug:Item6489: Separate WIKITOOLNAME from WEB name; escape WEB name to avoid auto-linking in case web is WikiWord |
| 2010-05-26: |
TWikibug:Item6474: Fix for mailnotify failing due to non-existing _alert method |
| 2010-05-21: |
TWikibug:Item6433: More doc fixes |
| 2010-04-25: |
TWikibug:Item6433: Doc fixes, no code changes |
| 15 Oct 2008 |
TWikibug:Item: generalised code to enable TWiki:Codev.SubscribePlugin to delegate parsing to MailerContrib - TWiki:Main.SvenDowideit |
| 14 Oct 2008 |
TWikibug:Item6066: fixed issue for user mappings where cuid = login - TWiki:Main.SvenDowideit |
| 27 Aug 2008 |
TWikibug:Item5949: fixed problem with unsubscribe that should result in an empty subscription |
| 03 Aug 2008 |
TWiki 4.2.1 release version |
| 27 Jul 2008 |
TWikibug:Item5776: TWiki:Main.KennethLavrsen added note to warn against running multiple instances of mailnotify at the same time. |
| 15 May 2008 |
TWikibug:Item5232: TWiki:Main.CrawfordCurrie added support for non-ascii alphanumerics in topic names to WebNotify. TWikibug:Item5630: TWiki:Main.SvenDowideit fixed some spelling errors |
| 25 Jan 2008 |
TWikibug:Item4812: added TWiki:Main.BobGoldstein's noexpand patch for groups |
| 2 Nov 2007 |
TWikibug:Item4818: added quotes to support non-alphabetic and other wierd group names TWikibug:Item4887: corrected minor rendering error TWikibug:Item4917: removed dependence on symbolic web names |
| 9 Sep 2007 |
TWikibug:Item4326 workaround for possible error in WebNotify API in old releases, Should not affect most users. |
| 6 Sep 2007 |
TWikibug:Item4488 doc tweaks |
| 14550 |
TWikibug:Item4461 - 'Changed' link now points to most recent changes, not the entire history |
| 22 Jun 2007 |
TWikibug:Item4284 - added access control checks and email filter |
| 21 May 2007 |
TWikibug:Item3969 - 8bit email fix (TWiki:Main.WillNorris) |
| 13623 |
TWikibug:Item4014 no changes was resetting the notify time to 0. Thanks to TWiki:Main.JeffCrawford for nailing this down. |
| 12496 |
TWikibug:Item3415 mailnotify did not send notifications to intranet users because of wrong call to findUser. |
| 11672 |
Added newsletter support, after much harassment from TWiki:Main.LynnwoodBrown |
| 11534 |
TWikibug:Item2153 Clarified docs. TWikibug:Item2698 Improved error reporting. |
| 8808 |
TWikibug:Item1654 mailnotify must enter the command_line context |
| 8625 |
TWikibug:Item1508 Making the dashes in the separatator clearer |
| 8606 |
TWikibug:Item1508 MailerContrib: Brushing up HTML mailnotify template |
| 8602 |
TWikibug:Item1508 MailerContrib: Cleaning up plaintext e-mail template, removing TEXTAREA |
| 8522 |
TWikibug:Item1511 arguments to getScriptUrl in wrong order  |
| 8434 |
TWikibug:Item1465 Fix 'TWiki.' to '%TWIKIEB%.' |
| 8398 |
TWikibug:Item1460 polished up the comment a bit |
| 8308 |
TWikibug:Item1362 moving mailnotify cron script |
| 7848 |
TWikibug:Item1167 forced all mail operations to generate absolute URLs |
| 7568 |
TWikibug:tem910 use SCRIPTURL{view} instead of complex url expr |
| 6864 |
TWikibug:tem624 mailer templates moved the the right places |
| 6861 |
TWikibug:tem624 Added proper templates support for plain text mails |
| 6809 |
TWikibug:tem623 don't print anything if verbosity is switched off. |
| 6659 |
TWikibug:tem528 Updated MailerContrib. it's working and the sendmail parameter is used. |
| 6474 |
TWikibug:tem420 removed spurious remove_obsolete_locks from MailerContrib |
| 5924 |
TWikibug:tem153 fix mail URL-fixing scheme |
| 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. Bug fixes to permissions code. Back-off and retry if the mailer can't be reached (should really be in Net::sendEmail) |
| 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 |
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