Thursday, December 27

MailHost redux

For some time we had quite an interesting and diverse landscape of mail host solutions for Zope and Plone.

With the upcoming release of Zope 2.11 we finally have a nice and feature rich default MailHost implementation in Zope 2 based on the zope.sendmail package. Major kudos to Andreas Jung for doing that work.

Today I have spent some hours to fix the standard mail host used in Plone provided by the SecureMailHost product to become nothing more than a tiny backwards compatibility layer on top of Zope 2's standard MailHost. Hopefully this work will go into Plone 4.0.

At that point we'll have a transaction-safe default mail delivery which you can turn into an asynchronous delivery by nothing more than a switch in the ZMI. And obviously it has SSL/TLS support as well :)

If you are interested in testing this, please get the code from http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/SecureMailHost/trunk.

Feedback welcome,
Hanno

2 comments:

chrism said...

On the flip side, IIRC, the asynchronous Zope 3 mailhost code has its own problems. You need to configure it to run on only one of your ZEO clients, as running it in more than one is silly, but that means changing your config per ZEO host in a place not in the config file. It would be better if it the sending was done by a dedicated process, releasing any client from the responsibility. IIRC, it's also not very smart about dealing with send failures.

malthe said...

At any rate, it's a leap forward in terms of code clarity that there's now only a single implementation to focus on. Relevant especially around Christmas, Plone needs to lose weight.