Bounce non-user email replies and errors so they don't "disappear silently"

[jywarren]

We should bounce back a reply email with either:

Your reply did not get posted because we couldn't find an account on PL.org (phrased more friendly and with a prompt to sign up?)

or if some other error occurred, just:

There was an error and your comment couldn't be posted

This could be broken into 2 emails -- and two issues.

Currently, the logic for processing the email is here:

plots2/script/mailman_server

Lines 26 to 31 in 60c95f0

	begin
	Comment.receive_mail(message)
	rescue Exception => e
	Mailman.logger.error "Exception occurred while receiving message:\n#{message}"
	Mailman.logger.error [e, *e.backtrace].join("\n")
	end

That already has a rescue block, where we could send the "there was an error" message!

For where there is no user found (for example if the sending email doesn't match the one on file for this user), we have a conditional loop here:

plots2/app/models/comment.rb

Lines 209 to 212 in 60c95f0

	def self.receive_mail(mail)
	user = User.where(email: mail.from.first).first
	if user
	node_id = mail.subject[/#([\d]+)/, 1] # This tooks out the node ID from the subject line

That could have an else clause which returns an email.

We could develop 2 email templates with mailer files here: https://github.com/publiclab/plots2/tree/master/app/mailers

Or we could try to send a shorter plain text response without a template, following some docs here (they're old so please test this out or double-check!):

• https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4916557/how-can-i-send-mail-with-rails-without-a-template#12974849
• ActionMailer::Base.mail(from: "me@example.com", to: "you@example.com", subject: "test", body: "test").deliver
• Up to date docs here: https://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionMailer/Base.html#method-i-mail

[jywarren]

It does seem possible that we could use the syntax ActionMailer::Base.mail(from: "me@example.com", to: "you@example.com", subject: "test", body: "test").deliver to just reply directly in the mailman_server file!

[SidharthBansal]

Can we add gci candidate to this issue?

[Anjalizi]

has this issue been solved yet? if not, please help me get started with this.

[grvsachdeva]

Hey @Anjalizi, users can reply to the email they receive from us and their comments are added to our website in case their email account exists in the database. But, in case of email account doesn't exist, then we need to send an email back to the user replying the above-given line.

We receive/poll for emails using mailman. the emails are processed at self.receive_mail method. You have to add check at the appropriate place to check user existence and send an email by creating a new mailer for that.

Thanks