How OG Mailinglist Works

OG Mailinglist turns Drupal into a mailinglist manager, somewhat similar to Mailman, Sympa, LISTSERV or several others. It has one great benefit, which is seamless web integration.

How It Works

Let's say Joe <joe@example.com>, Matti <matti@example.com> and Ljuba <ljuba@example.com> are all members of OG group called "New group", which has email <new-group@example.org>. Let us also say that Joe and Matti have chosen "Email subscription", while Ljuba preferred "No email". None of them uses digest emails.

1. Joe goes to example.org/new-group and posts a new node. Matti gets an email with the contents. It might look like this:
   

   From: Matti <matti@example.com>
   To: New group <new-group@example.com>
   Subject: Too many new posts every day
   
   Maybe I'm the only one who thinks this, but there are too many posts in this group. Could you please stop?
   
   -- Full post: http://example.org/node/30 
   Manage my subscriptions: http://example.org/og_mailinglist/subscriptions 
   Stop emails for this post: http://example.org/og_mailinglist/unsubscribe/30 
   

2. Matti gets the email and feels the same way. He replies by hitting the "Reply to list" button (or just Reply to all), and writes Man, you are so right, it annoys me as well. Now Joe gets an email. If Matti used the "Reply to list" button, it also has the footer. If he used "Reply to all", then Joe gets mail directly, so it probably has no "-- Full post..." footer. By simply using the "Reply" button, only Joe would have received the mail and it would not have been posted to the website either. Please note that this happens if OGM is configured to not use Reply-To header.
3. Ljuba occasionally checks the example.org page and reaches the bespoken node 30, so she replies with a comment: Come on, Joe, you could just use digest if your mailbox gets cluttered. At least that would save us the headache.Now Joe and Matti both get an email with the same content.

Of course, one could start a new thread (called posting a new node in drupalistanian) by sending an email to the group address which, in our case, is <new-group@example.com>.