Sending reminder to multiple recepients

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First, a warning: Given other demands on my time (like my actual job) it would be a while before I could get to any of this.

Taking your main issue first, requesting support for sending to multiple addresses...

Well, yeah, it sounds like this would be easy. And supposedly the underlying drupal_mail() api handles this. (See the description of the $to parameter.) But I never was able to get that to work and don't know what the issue is. Date Reminder basically just passes the content of that field to drupal_mail().

See _datereminder_send_reminder() here.

As for allowing a bigger field... I don't know if it's possible to do that without making the table view really ugly. That would require some experimentation.

Hey, Drupal is open source, so feel free to experiment, and suggest a patch if you find something that works.

Some things you might try to get what you want:

• Use a distribution list. I don't know if drupal_mail() or anything else in Drupal supports this. An externally-run email distribution list might work. (That's what I do on my own site that I originally wrote this for.)
• Create a separate reminder entry for each recipient. Yes, I understand that that could be cumbersome if there are lots of entries.

Regarding being able to create and administer reminders for another user...

Yes, I see the value in this, and I had a mind to do that in the original development. But it added a level of complexity that wasn't worth the effort for me at the time. And until some free time magically appears in my schedule....

Again, open source. If anyone wanted to take this on, go for it. (Though perhaps we should talk strategy first.)

More on the multiple emails issue.

I went back and looked at the form validation code, and it looks like Date Reminder at least attempts to support multiple addresses. See _datereminder_form_validate_user().

So yes, the form validate expects a comma-separated list of email addresses, but as mentioned earlier, drupal_mail() doesn't seem to like it.

That still leaves the field size issue, of course.

Regarding issue 1:

I finally went back and tried it, and it multiple reminders seem to be handled just fine. Or at least they are if you separate the addresses by exactly a comma. I tried entering two addresses, comma separated, and they were sent just fine.

Now I'll admit, there are apparently issues if you don't do it exactly right, for example, if you separate by "comma-space." The form processing could definitely be more robust.

And the database field is limited to 255 characters, so that's going to be a hard limit without a change.

So given the first issue in the original report:

1: I get an error when setting a reminder with more then one e-mailaddress in the to-field.

How were you trying to enter multiple addresses? Were you separating by commas? Commas only? Does it work for you if you use just commas?

The current 7.x-1.x-dev release has some improvements in handling a list of email addresses in the reminder form. Multiple addresses still need to be separated by commas, but extra white space is stripped out. And an error has been fixed in how form errors are recorded. Feel free to try it.

Still limited to 255 characters of addresses, however.

The improvement to validating email addresses is in 7.x-1.7 and 6.x-1.3.

Putting off expanding the email field size for now. Doing that would require changing the database schema, which is a rather more touchy issue.

Well, fixed to the extent it will be.