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

[Tom Hughes]

David Earl wrote:

> 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.

Yes, I have considered this, and one day I might do it. It is 
non-trivial however as the machines which have access to the database 
are not able to receive incoming email.

> 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.).

I have thought about this as well, but I'm much more wary of this as we 
will get lots of flak about spam and things.

Tom

-- 
Tom Hughes (tom at compton.nu)
http://www.compton.nu/