Can I submit content to my wiki by email?

Hi David,

Email in facility would get my vote. I think you have probably heard me banging on about a better way to upload the contents of word documents into pages. What ever happened to the drop box (http://blog.pbwiki.com/2007/06/18/sha...) I ask? Anything that would make the process uploading information from local machines into pbwiki is my opinion very important and that is why I would support an email in facility. I'd like to have the ability to attach a document to an email, send it off to my wiki and hey presto I have a page with the information. I think most people receive important updates by email and the ability to forward this to a specific 'updates' page to maintain an archive of this info would be welcome. I really am sceptical whether you are serious about better local integration. Given that the drop box never got out of beta kind of suggest to me pbwiki is not that interested. But as you say, people need to shout out if they want this. Here is another vote anyway.

Seanmac

I'm guessing that's the way a "2.0" wiki looks? Please tell me that there's a way to hide the IP addresses of contributors...

For my $0.02 on the email-to-wiki facility, I'd see the subject line be the default wiki page title, with a simple renaming algorithm, perhaps the as used in various OS filesystems. The body of the message would be the wiki post -- perhaps it could handle HTML -- and any attachments to the email would get saved to "Files" and attached to the wiki page. Of course all normal input filters would apply, just like sending the content via web browser. In case of an error, a reply email might fire back with instructions on how to rectify the error (this could be the recourse in case of page name collisions too).

This could be made already, too, if someone sets up an extract-email script that then sends the content to the pbwiki API...

Hi,

My thoughts on it are slightly different. I use email in facilities for google docs and zoho writer and I would like a similar level of functionality. Here, the attached word document would be converted into a new page, the title of which would be extracted from the title of the document by default. If the page did already exist an email would be shot back to you say that there was a problem. If you wanted to append information to a page, you would specify the page name in the subject line and the contents of the email would be appended to the of the page. The details of person doing the appending would be presented adjacent ot it (say like a comment). I suppose I am envisaging a blog type format for appending. I don't agree that word files should saved to 'files' if they were attached. I'm not a big fan of having editable documents upload on to pbwiki. Nothing is stopping users form downloading the document, changing it and then uploading it. You have no way to track the changes and maintain versions as you would if you had to edit a pbwiki page. I have no problem with non editable attachments (eg pdfs) being uploaded to the files page.

Seanmac

Hey Seanmac,

Good points. I admit I'm a pbwiki newbie, but the behavior you describe seems to me counterintuitive. Whether or not editable docs can be uploaded into the files area depends on your usage -- in our private wiki most of our uploaded files are Word docs. Ideally, pbwiki would version the uploaded files too, like Basecamp does (iirc).

What would happen to embedded images or other embedded objects if the Word doc was to be converted to a wiki page? What about other non-MS formats such as those used for OpenOffice?

On the other hand, when people send something as an attachment, often the message body is mainly a comment about the attachment, so maybe what you're describing would be a viable route.

On the other other hand if you're opening up an email client to send a post, and you didn't want the attachment saved as an uploaded file, why couldn't you just copy-paste into the email?

Part of my input is an attempt to address David's rightful questions about dealing with page name collisions. Some of these things could be dealt with via configuration options (Attachment handling options, page name collisions) and/or variant addresses: post@mywiki.pbwiki.com, comment@mywiki.pbwiki.com, upload@mywiki.pbwiki.com.

I would love to see this functionality. I post to my blog this way from my blackberry. I take a picture, write my text as the subject line and it appears as a posting. This is one of the main reasons I have favored blog use over pbwiki up to now. I would come running back to pbwiki if I could do this because the rest of your features are so rich.

Maybe I'm not understanding this functionality because it doesn't sound very collaborative. If you want a blog, use a blog. Is anyone using PBWiki as a blog? Why?

JotSpot used to have a working implementation of this feature. Their solution was to assign each page a unique email address (e.g. wikipage+authentication_code@your.domain) and treat the whole thing as similar to a wiki comment. So the email message (an any attachments) would be appended to the page rather than replacing existing content.

Sounds like a reasonable model to me. No risk of data loss, and dead simple to contribute content. It'd be very useful for intranet-ish activities (e.g. keeping track of decisions, historical reference, file archiving, etc.) as long as users only need to be contributing to a handful of pages each. There's a practical limit to how many pages' email addresses they can reasonably juggle. 3? 5? I'd guess somewhere in that range.

Here are two more implementations that could be models.

Not built-in, but there's a MediaWiki plugin http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extensi... that accepts page appends via email e.g. pagename@your.domain

SocialText just says their wiki pages also accept content by mail. <http://www.socialtext.com/products/fe...>. Not clear what scheme to determine where a message goes, and whether they treat that as an append or a replace. Anyone else know how they've chosen to handle it?

Add my vote for an email to wiki feature. Very useful to have something like this!

I second the motion that updating via email would be grand.

The way I would want to use it is send an email to <wikiname><current name="true">@pbwiki.com with subject name <new name="true">.

After uploading, a link would appear on <current> (a page that has already been created in PbWiki) that would like to a newly created page named <new name="true"> (the subject from the email). This page would contain the body of the email as well as any attachments.

Would be killer for me.</new></current></new></current></wikiname>

I wrote a little program that will automatically create or update pbwiki pages via e-mail or local files. I wrote this because it was tedious to make changes to MS Word and Excel files and then have to upload the revised file to my wiki every time I made a small change. I also wanted to add e-mail integration to make it easier for people to add content.

You need to have a v1.0 pbwiki site and an API key from PBWiki to use this program. It seems to work okay with my private v1.0 wiki, but won't work with a 2.0 wiki. You can download a Windows program or a perl script if you want it to work with other operating systems.

See http://fredwiki2.pbwiki.com/pbwiki-Au... to get more information.

This is really just a first attempt. It works for me, but there may be bugs so please be cautious. If you find a problem, you can let me know and I will attempt to fix it.

- Andrew

Andrew,

I'm liking this, I'm liking this a lot. But .....I can't get it to work. Here is the content of my config file (with some of the content occluded)

PBWiki Auto Update Configuration File
************************************************************************
Wiki Name: "oncallwikitest"
API key: "d2e4ee6eb8286de4a6494032115axxxxxxxxxxxx"
Wiki Content File Name = "wikiContent.txt"
Verbose Mode: "1"
Debug Mode: "0"
************************************************************************
C:\Documents and Settings\Admin\Desktop\Pbwiki\Autoupdate datedesc
XXXXXXXXXX@yahoo.co.uk XXXXXX pop.mail.yahoo.co.uk 1

I'n running XP here. By the way is this secure? I just thought I could be sending someone the password to my email address!! Are you planning to tweak it for 2.0?

Cheers,

Seanmac