[OSM-talk] Make Messaging public, or other changes?

[David Earl]

On 24/11/2008 08:38, Tom Hughes wrote:
>> There could always be a gentle reminder when reading messages that:
>>
>>   * There’s a wiki;
>>   * there are several mailing lists
 >
> I can tell you right now that a gentle reminder will have very little 
> effect.
> 
> I know this because the absolutely vast, exceedingly non gentle, four 
> language reminder about using the web site to reply rather than email is 
> ignored by large numbers of people every day. Most amusing are the ones 
> who carefully strip the notice off when replying without actually 
> managing to take any notice of it.

Why not go with the flow here and allow replies by email? It's the 
natural reaction.

If you send a message out from the website send-a-message with a random 
token in it somewhere (e.g. reply-to: 
"token"@privatemail.openstreetmap.com, or subject: bla bla ["token"], or 
in the message-id, so you can see any reply is a reply to a web-site 
originated message, then you could capture the replies and insert them 
as if they'd been done on the website. So long as they come from a known 
member and they contain a valid reply token, I think the risk of spam 
would be very small indeed. I'd certainly find it more convenient to be 
able to reply to the emails, and we could remove all the other stuff 
around the message which often outweighs the message itself.

I wonder if we could even allow messages to be initiated by email (so we 
all have, in effect, emails of the form 
"username"@privatemail.openstreetmap.org or some such. There obviously 
is more risk of spam, but if it is restricted to say one email per 
minute and it has to come from a known email address, do you think spam 
would be a problem? (It someone is determined enough, they can already 
spam people: you just need a script to scrape the send-a-message pages 
and you can already do it through the website.).

Capturing incoming email isn't too hard: the main issue is language 
encodings IMO.

David