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If Alice and Bob are on a Team, "Alice and Bobs Team", then Alice can send an email to "aliceandbobsteam@synapse.org". The message will be sent to each team member as if it were sent to them directly.
TODO: Shall we limit Team messaging in any way? E.g. can only Team admin's send messages to Teams? Shall we only allow messaging to small Teams? (We could even combine the two and allow all small Team members to email each other, but for large Teams only allow admin's to do so.)We will allow Team administrators to control who has permission to send messages to the Team.
Each message will have a "one-click unsubscribe" footer, facilitating update of the recipient's notification settings to suppress email delivery.
Leveraging the Synapse
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Messaging System
Synapse has an existing system for sending messages, described here: Messaging services. This service requires the client to upload the body of an email to an S3 file, then create a message object referencing the file and containing other metadata (from, to, subject). We will leverage this by adding a component which receives emails and converts them to web requests. The service we have investigated for this purpose is http://www.cloudmailin.com/. CloudMailIn has an option to format requests as JSON, http://docs.cloudmailin.com/http_post_formats/json/
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We add a JSON schema to lib-auto-generated, org.sagebionetworks.repo.model.message.cloudmailin.Message, describing the CloudMailIn JSON format. A POST containing this message is authorized using 'Basic Authentication'. Also it takes a parameter, notificationUnsubscribeEndpoint, which is the Synapse Portal endpoint for one-click unsubscription. The message content is uploaded to an S3 with a MIME type application/x-cloudmailin-json.
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/json.
The message metadata (to, from, subject) is saved in Synapse as a MessageToUser object. We add a new field, notificationUnsubscribeEndpoint, to capture this metadata, used during message delivery (see below).
Message Delivery
The Synapse message system delivers messages via calls to Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) by asynchronous workers. The message metadata and S3 file are retrieved and, depending on whether the MIME type is text/plain or text/html, a plain or html message is constructed using the SES 'Formatted Email' API (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-email-formatted.html). This system will be extended in two ways:
(1) For messages having MIME type application/json the CloudMailIn text, html, and attachments are assembled into a multipart message and sent via the SES 'raw' interface (http://docs.aws.amazon.com/ses/latest/DeveloperGuide/send-email-raw.html);
(2) For all messages, whether plain, html, or a combination, a one-click unsubscribe footer will be added.