Slack to Mail List Integration

[Brian Spector <br...@miracl.com>]

One of the big topics of conversation at ApacheCon was how many folks
warmed to the idea of using Slack or Gitter for real time communication for
their projects, but many folks on the Apache Team were worried that there
was no archive available of conversations in Slack chat to the Apache
Infrastructure Team.

We seem to have achieved the impossible.

By using a few tools we now have all chat in #general channel on the
Milagro Slack team being routed into the dev@milagro.incubator.apache.org
mailing list every three or four minutes.

We do this with a few tools. It's convoluted because the Apache Mailing
list will not let email accounts sign with with reply-to, so we had to mash
some things together.

1. Mailclark / https://mailclark.ai forwards the email out of the #general
channel to Mailparser /mailparser.io.
2. Mailparser creates an HTTP Rest Call to the Gmail API to send an email
into the dev@milagro.incubator.apache.org mailing list from the
slack-milagro-dev-apache@milagro.io email account.

This only goes one way for now (from Slack to
dev@milagro.incubator.apache.org mailing list).

Hopefully this makes the folks who want to use Slack happy and also the
Apache Community happy who, rightly so, want a record of information that
has transpired to be logged into the mailing lists.

Have a good weekend.






On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 1:15 PM, <sl...@milagro.io>
wrote:

> NOTE: ALL CHAT IN THIS CHANNEL is sent to the
> [url=dev@milagro.incubating.apache.org]dev@milagro.incubating.apache.org
> [/url]
> mail list. If you want to have a private chat, please do so in a one
> on one message.
>
> @brian pinned a message to this channel.
>
> @brian set the channel topic: The CHAT version of
> [url=dev@milagro.incubating.apache.org]dev@milagro.incubating.apache.org
> [/url]
> using Slack. ALL CHAT IS SENT TO
> [url=dev@milagro.incubating.apache.org]dev@milagro.incubating.apache.org
> [/url]
> .
>
> @brian set the channel topic: ALL CHAT IN GENERAL IS SENT TO
> [url=dev@milagro.incubating.apache.org]dev@milagro.incubating.apache.org
> [/url]
> .
>
> | By Brian Spector
>
> NOTE: ALL CHAT IN THIS CHANNEL is sent to the
> [url=dev@milagro.incubating.apache.org]dev@milagro.incubating.apache.org
> [/url]
> mail list. If you want to have a private chat, please do so in a one
> on one message.
>



-- 
Brian Spector
CEO
MIRACL

T: +44 (0) 20 3389 8190
https://www.miracl.com
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Re: Slack to Mail List Integration

[Nick Kew <ni...@apache.org>]

On Fri, 2016-05-27 at 13:27 +0100, Brian Spector wrote:

> Hopefully this makes the folks who want to use Slack happy and also the
> Apache Community happy who, rightly so, want a record of information that
> has transpired to be logged into the mailing lists.

Chat and mail are different in nature.  I don't want a mailbox
full of trivial messages that are meaningless out of context
and administrivia, nor do I want all my chat trivia ("gotta go
and get a pint of milk", "hang on ... on the 'phone") to be
constrained by the thought that it's going to pollute the
list for everyone.

In short, a gateway needs to be under human control, and more
discriminating.

Apache has some experience with such gatewaying.  Members'
formal meetings take place over IRC with a bot acting as
secretary and (among other things) posting the record of
the meeting to the mailinglist.  That comes with helpful
tools: things can be marked as off-record, and a back-
channel is provided for free chat that won't be posted.
Crucially, the meeting is posted as a single message,
making it readable as a record.

In other circumstances on freenode (and not just apache
channels) it's more usual to *ban* indiscriminate logging,
precisely because it constrains chat.

Can your mailclark be configured to work under human
control?  A chat log may want to be preserved on occasion,
but those occasions should be when chat deals with
significant project matters, and any message probably
should have a brief intro (like a commit message) telling
at-a-glance what it's about.  And a way to keep individual
messages un-logged?  For example, as in members meetings
logs where messages can be marked [off] record, and /me
messages are also excluded.

-- 
Nick Kew