[[!template id=plugin name=postal author="[[DavidBremner]]"]]
[[!tag type/special-purpose]]

The `postal` plugin allows users to send mail to
a special address to comment on a page. It uses the [[mailbox]]
plugin to display their comments in the wiki.

This plugin is not in ikiwiki yet, but can be downloaded
from <http://pivot.cs.unb.ca/git/ikipostal.git>

Details:

  * Adds a mailto: url to each page matching some pagespec
    (currently every page gets a comment footer)

  * This mailto url goes to an address identifying the page  (something like
    user-iki-blog~I\_hate\_markdown@host.fqdn.tld).
    [more details](http://www.cs.unb.ca/~bremner/blog/posts/encoding)         
   
  * on the mail receiving end, these messages are either deleted, or ran through
    a filter to be turned into blog posts.   I have
[written](http://pivot.cs.unb.ca/git/?p=ikipostal.git;a=blob_plain;f=filters/postal-accept.pl;hb=HEAD)
  a filter that decodes the address and writes the message into an appropriate 
mailbox. The changes are then checked into version control; typically a hook then updates the html version of the wiki.
  * work in progress can be 

   - [cloned](http://pivot.cs.unb.ca/git/ikipostal.git), or 
   - [browsed](http://pivot.cs.unb.ca/git/?p=ikipostal.git;a=summary)
  
 * I would be interested in any ideas people have about security.

The current version of this plugin is now running on my home page. See for example
[a recent post in my blog](http://www.cs.unb.ca/~bremner/blog/posts/can-i-haz-a-distributed-rss/).  
Unfortunately although the [[mailbox|todo/mbox]] renderer supports threading, I haven't had 
a chance to implement comments on comments yet. --[[DavidBremner]]
