CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Thanks to UAS’s Shane Hill’s impressive recent CiviMail improvements (currently, among others, an order of magnitute speed-up in email generation…) and the forthcoming changes for Democrats Abroad, we decided to make a separate CiviCRM release consisting of CiviCRM 1.8 and the improved CiviMail. The release will be called CiviCRM 1.9 and is developed on the v1.9 branch in our Subversion repository.

CiviCRM 1.9 will be strictly a CiviMail-improvement release, which means there will be no changes to core CiviCRM nor other CiviCRM components.

Now, the poll. One of the improvements we want to roll in this release is that all of the CiviMail actions that the users can now undertake over SMTP, like subscribe, unsubscribe, or opt-out, can also work over HTTP. This means that instead of, for example, sending an email to unsubscribe…@example.com, the user will be presented with a http:// link performing the same action. We believe this to be a much user-friendly solution.

The question we want to ask is whether there are any advantages in leaving the SMTP (email) actions after we make sure they are properly re-implemented over HTTP. Dropping the support for these actions over SMTP would simplify the related CiviMail code greatly, as well as make the return SMTP channel (which is the hardest part to setup when building a CiviMail site) only needed to handle bounces. So, are there any compelling reasons to keep the SMTP (un)subscribe/opt-out functionality in place if it’s fully reimplemented over HTTP?

Brevity being the soul of wit: I agree with adrianrf.