E-Mail Configuration

See also HelpOnConfiguration.

Outgoing mails

In order to enable support for outgoing mails, you must specify the From: address with "mail_from". Furthermore, you must enable a transport, either by SMTP (use "mail_smarthost" to enable it) or by sendmail (use "mail_sendmail" to enable it). If you use "mail_smarthost" and the server requires authentication, then set "mail_login", too.

mail_from

This value is used for the "From:" and "To:" headers in the emails sent (the "To:" has email address privacy reasons, email is not really sent to this address, but we don't want to disclose any real recipient address).

mail_smarthost

This is the IP or domain name of an FOLDOC:SMTP enabled server. On a Unix host, you can try to use localhost; on a Windows machine this will normally be a machine in your LAN or some host of your ISP.

mail_login

This is only needed when you use mail_smarthost and a server that requires SMTP AUTH to send mail; in that case, set this to the username and password separated by a space, i.e. "user pwd".

mail_sendmail

This is a local command to run to send a message. If set to e.g. '/usr/sbin/sendmail -t -i', use this sendmail command to send mail. This is only useful on machines that have a mail transport agent installed.

Incoming Mails (1.6 only)

If you want to import mails to your MoinMoin wiki, i.e. allow it to receive and store the mails, you have to setup a few things.

First you have to setup your mail server to pipe every new mail into MoinMoin. The command is moin xmlrpc mailimport. Note that you can use the parameter --config /path/to/dir to supply the path to a directory with a suitable MoinMoin configuration file. Then you have ensure that there is a file called mailimportconf.py in that directory. It has to look like this (there is a sample file shipped in wiki/config):

# This secret has to be known by the wiki server
mailimport_secret = u"foo"

# The target URL
mailimport_url = u"http://localhost:81/?action=xmlrpc2"

The secret is used to let the script authenticate itself at the wiki. The URL consists of the regular wiki URL and ?action=xmlrpc2.

Now you can configure the wiki. There are the following configuration options:

mail_import_subpage_template

This is the template for the pagename generated by the mail import code. See below for supported placeholders.

mail_import_wiki_address

The e-mail address of the e-mails that should go into the wiki. MoinMoin searches for this address to know the target pagename, it should match the address that is known to the mail server.

mail_import_secret

The secret that matches the mailimportconf.py configuration file. See above.

After you have configured the settings explained above, you should be able sending yourself mails. The actual usage is explained below.

E-Mail Features

MoinMoin currently offers two email-based services, which are explained in the following sections.

Sending Login Data

If emailing is available, the UserPreferences dialog is expanded with a field "Your email address" and a button " Mail me my account data ". The user can enter the email address he provided at registration and then gets an email containing all necessary data to re-login, after clicking the button.

Change Notification

Any user can subscribe to changes of wiki pages by either clicking on the envelope icon , or by adding a regex to the "Subscribed wiki pages" field of his UserPreferences. The system then sends, whenever a page is changed and the author doesn't uncheck the "Send mail notification" checkbox, an email with the author, a link to the page, and the diff of the change. The author does not get notified of his own changes.

Receiving mails (1.6 only)

MoinMoin is able to receive mails. Mainly, you need to know what the e-mail address of the wiki is and send a mail to it. If you supply the target pagename before the wiki address (typing MyWikiPage <wiki@example.com> for example), you will get your mail into the wiki quite easily. There are a few rules for your mail:

From

We check the From: header if it is from a valid wiki user. Of course this is no real security, but maybe better than nothing.

To

To: is (as usual) made of 2 parts, like TEMPLATE <wiki@example.org>. We use the "realname" part to make up the target page name template (can contain special chars, blanks etc.) and the email address part to get it to the right destination. The simplest form of a target page name template is just a pagename like WikiSandBox.

See the example for the 2 different modes of operation.

Subject

If To: has no target TEMPLATE, we use this field to extract target page [TEMPLATE].

E.g.:

Subject: bla bla bla [PageName/$date]

Mail body

The new page content is made from old page content (if any) plus the content of the email appended at the end. Page content will never get overwritten. Mails that are sent as alternative are shown with their HTML body on the page which is processed by a HTML parser.

E-Mail attachments will get put into page attachments under the page where the content will be put. Attachments will never get overwritten. The attachments will be linked from the content page (e.g. from a list of attachments at the end).

Generated content

If requested by a leading +-sign (e.g. + PageName/), MoinMoin adds a table item to the parent page listing details about the e-mail.

Pagename generation

The placeholders $from (containing the name of the sender), $date (the date) and $subject (subject line) are supported.

The pagename is generated like explained below:

1. Check if the wiki is in one of the address fields, get the pagename template from there if possible.
2. If there is no pagename template yet, look at the subject (explained above).

3. If the pagename ends with a slash, append the configuration setting email_subpage_template (see above) to the pagename.

4. Expand the pagename template to get the actual pagename.