Change domain of internal mail system to foodsharing.de
There is a date and event nearing that I always pushed forward without pursuing and now it gets quite late: We lose control over lebensmittelretten.de on 31.12.2018 and therefore cannot further use it for handling the email services of the foodsharing.de platform. There is two things with it, as it will be a service interruption anyway: a) stop using the shitty on-platform email integration b) switch to another domain to provide email services to the users.
While a) is an extra, b) is necessary. Theoretically, we can just switch over the domains and allow receiving from both domains (foodsharing.de as well as lebensmittelretten.de) for a short timeframe. How to make users and especially people who know the lebensmittelretten.de email addresses aware of the address change? We could theoretically not allow both domains for receiving but just the foodsharing.de one and enable an auto responder on lebensmittelretten.de to tell people they should write to xyz@foodsharing.de. Maybe our mail system supports both at the same time (it is a greensta hosted account).
a) I would like to look into options for a) as well as within all these troubles, noone cares about having slightly bigger troubles :-) Currently, our provider has a catchall for *@lebensmittelretten.de that gets regularly collected and fed into our database by a script on our side. My suggestion: Instead of putting emails into the database, feed them into maildirs on the server. This can happen as before ("quick and dirty") or using an MDA like from postfix. Then, add an IMAP Server that supports shared folders (e.g. dovecot) and configure this accordingly from within the foodsharing application:
- each user has a personal mailbox. The foodsharing.de login data works for that as well. Currently, this is store coordinators +, we can keep it like that, just add some scripts...
- each user has 0..N added shared mailboxes that get configured according to the existing rules.
This leaves the outgoing path unclear for now. We already use a local postfix as a satellite server, but don't have any authorization coupled with it. This might become a bit complicated. As I would give users access to their mailboxes via a webmail client like roundcube, I wonder if there are any plugins which do authorization inside the webmail client. Adding a proper MTA setup is then a future todo.
So with and without a) I would propose:
- In november, make a plan and notify users via ambassador board.
- asap (november/early december, after users know), switch over to foodsharing.de for the primary email domain
- for a short time, allow receiving emails on both.
- if possible, add an autoresponder to notify senders of the domain change. If this is exclusive to receiving, then at least add it for the second half of december
- keep autoresponder configured end of december, as it is likely that lebensmittelretten.de is not directly reused but still kept "silent" for a few weeks, so we reach more people in that time :-)