[Using Sakai] Your experience with Email Archive tool

[Verity Allan]

Hi,

See my responses inline. A caveat first: I'm no longer directly involved 
with running my institution's Sakai instance, so my data here is a couple 
of months out of date.

> Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 12:16:08 -0800 (PST)
> From: Keli Sato Amann <kamann at stanford.edu>
> Subject: [Using Sakai] Your experience with Email Archive tool
> To: sakai-user at collab.sakaiproject.org
> Message-ID:
> 	<1903355863.2458467.1329423368584.JavaMail.root at zm07.stanford.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8
>
> Hello,
> We've had random people on campus mentioning they wished that one could send an email to all site participants without logging into Sakai. It was a surprise to find that email archive already existed. However, I spoke with our tech support who was here early on and they said that we had looked into using it early on but got reports of it dropping email, so we stopped. For now, instructors an still use our Mailman installation to request a mailing list for their class that is already synched with enrollment as well as lists for just students and staff. But the ability to do this from Sakai might have some advantages for project sites, which would require more active management.
>
> A search on "email archive sakai" reveals several schools seem to still be using email archive so I was wondering
> 1) did you also experience problems of mail being sent to that address but not being received and/or archived? If those problems were real, have they been addressed by code updates in later versions of the tool, or in tweaking local set up?

This isn't a problem we've noticed. The main problem we've had is that 
people may have multiple email addresses that they use on campus, and the 
email archive means that only the email address that's registered with it 
will work (for obvious reasons - it's to prevent non-site-members from 
spamming lists).

  >
> 2) It would be interesting to know which of the following tools your school offers and which are available but stealthed (available only to those who ask). For instance, I have filled in what Stanford does below
> -Mailtool (to be replaced in 2.9 by Mail Sender)--Stanford offered as stealthed tool but now offers Messages because this was deprecated
> -Messages (MSGCNTR): yes, stealthed, considering making default
> -Announcements: yes
> -Email Archive: no
>
We use Mail Sender, Announcements and Email Archive. Messages is 
stealthed, but a few sites use it (mostly for person-to-person 
communication without revealing email addresses).
We found that Mail Sender was popular in course sites, and Email Archive 
in project sites - perhaps because project sites are often used by 
research collaborations, and they're often used to organising things via 
email anyway. Personally, I've never been very clear about why you'd use 
Mail Sender/Mail Tool rather than announcements, unless you send a lot of 
email and you don't want to clutter up the site - but at that point you're 
running the risk that your site members just delete this constant annoying 
stream of email.
Anyway, our experience is that Mail Tool/Announcements fills a different 
need from the Email Archive.

>
> 4) If you do use Email Archive did anyone tweak it so that the address is hardcoded and not customizable?
>
No - we allowed customisation.

I will say that there are other problems with the email archive. Testing 
it is a real pain. (This is mostly to do with how one configures QA boxes 
and mail servers. I can go into more detail off-list - or on-list if this 
is useful - about why this is.) Horrible things like manual tests of the 
mail server need to be done. On the other hand, we've had very few serious 
problems with Email Archive - it Just Works. The main helpdesk issue is 
people trying to send from an unauthorised address.

Regards,
Verity
CARET
University of Cambridge