[Building Sakai] 2.9 Ideas: Include Mailsender in Sakai core?

[David Adams]

>From the "CLE Project Coordination Summary" thread, under proposals for 2.9:

> * Inclusion of Mailsender, a drop-in replacement for
> the deprecated Mailtool, as a core tool

I don't believe Mailsender is ready to be part of Sakai core. Currently, Mailsender does not use the Sakai EmailService to send mail, but rather re-implements the service itself. I don't think we should include tools in Sakai core that go around the services provided by Sakai. Doing so introduces a lot real and potential problems, mainly for deployers:

 * Troubleshooting problems with the code becomes twice as hard.

 * Security holes and bugs are unlikely to be fixed at the same time nor in the same manner.

 * Weird configuration problems and oversights are almost inevitable for places with unique SMTP requirements.

 * Logging of sent messages and failures will not match that of the core services, and any customization or logging configuration will have to be done twice.

 * Duplicating a core service in a tool's code breaks the entire IoC architecture of Sakai. If a local deployment wanted to replace or extend EmailService to provide message queuing, special routing, better logging, custom filtering, or to fit in with a particularly complicated SMTP configuration, they'd be out of luck unless they also wanted to patch Mailsender.

My other concern about Mailsender is that it doesn't seem to be actively under development. The only commit in 2011 was a minor pom.xml change. A lot of tools ramp up to a proof-of-concept state and show real promise and then get pulled into Sakai before they're ready, and subsequently languish while bugs, security holes, and incompatibilities pile up. See: blogger, profile, rwiki, search, mailtool, web services, a large number of portal alternatives, warehouse, reports. I'm tempted to throw James and Quartz on that list, but they've been languishing since Sakai 2.0 or so.

Mailsender is a small tool and a tiny example of these problems that I see in a lot of places in Sakai. But I'd like to see future releases take steps towards increasing the quality and discipline in the codebase. Adding a tool like Mailsender in its current state would be going the wrong direction.
-- 
David Adams
Director, Learning Systems Integration and Support
Virginia Tech Learning Technologies