[ZendTo] Feature request...

Kevin Miller kevin.miller at juneau.org
Mon Apr 6 23:31:50 BST 2020


Jules, you’re mentioning archiving email.  Maybe I’m misunderstanding but  what they really need is “ust something daily that would allow us to track when our users put something in there.”  Something along the lines of logwatch, i.e. a log parser or sql query that could run via cron and put out a simple text report  which could then be mailed to an appropriate recipient.

Or am I over-interpreting what you’ve whipped up?

...Kevin
--
Kevin Miller
Network/email Administrator, CBJ MIS Dept.
155 South Seward Street
Juneau, Alaska 99801
Phone: (907) 586-0242, Fax: (907) 586-4588 Registered Linux User No: 307357

From: ZendTo <zendto-bounces at zend.to> On Behalf Of Jules via ZendTo
Sent: Monday, April 6, 2020 7:45 AM
To: Branden Holloway <mbholloway at juneaupolice.com>
Cc: Jules <Jules at Zend.To>; Kevin Miller <kevin.miller at juneau.org>; ZendTo Users <zendto at zend.to>
Subject: Re: [ZendTo] Feature request...

EXTERNAL E-MAIL: BE CAUTIOUS WHEN OPENING FILES OR FOLLOWING LINKS
________________________________
Branden,

Okay, no problem.

The possible email messages fall into a few different types:
- new drop-offs from internal users (what you specifically want to capture)
- new drop-offs from external users (relatively hard to distinguish one of these from one above)
- re-sends of existing drop-offs, only applies to internal users
- notification that file(s) have been picked up (could be very useful to you in the future?)
- request for files sent to external user
I'm already ignoring the emails sent to external users to verify their email address.

So we have 5 remaining categories, which could be keyworded similarly to this:
    new-internal
    new-external
    resend
    pickup
    request

So I could add a 2nd new preferences.php option which is a list of a selection of those 5 keywords.
If you include that keyword in your list, you get that type of email archived.

In your situation, you would only want 'new-internal' for now, but 'resend' and/or 'pickup' might be useful to you in the future. Particularly when someone says that one of your users never sent a file, when they did, and when the recipient even picked it up but then lost it. Re-sends of existing drop-offs can only be done by internal (logged in) users, so you don't need to worry about seeing logs of incoming stuff from outside *@juneaupolice.com<mailto:*@juneaupolice.com>.

Would that be close enough? Or am I heading down a totally different alley from what you actually want?

It's just that giving you a full copy of each of the relevant types of email message means that you get *all* the info about each relevant drop-off, including not only the "who, what and when", but also the checksums, sizes, notes, whether it was encrypted or not, everything.
You're bound to need more than the "who, what and when" at some point in the future.

Have a think. Talk to Kevin.

Cheers,
Jules.

On 06/04/2020 15:36, Branden Holloway wrote:
I am not sure that is exactly what we are after but i am not sure.  We are trying to get an email that shows the name, date and a list of files dropped off by *@juneaupolice.com<mailto:*@juneaupolice.com>.   If the emails you listed below would give us that info then that would work.  I am not sure it would be appropriate for us to receive emails outside our domain.


On Apr 6, 2020, at 9:19 AM, Jules <Jules at zend.to><mailto:Jules at zend.to> wrote:

EXTERNAL E-MAIL: BE CAUTIOUS WHEN OPENING FILES OR FOLLOWING LINKS
________________________________
Kevin,

I've written the code, but haven't tested it yet. It's a fairly simple set of changes, and 1 new preferences.php setting (the archive email address to use).

Here's what I have written in the Changelog and in preferences.php:

- Added new preferences.php setting 'archiveEmailAddress'. If this is not ''
  and it contains an '@', then this address is added to the "Bcc" list of
  every email sent by ZendTo, except for those used to verify remote senders.
  It is '', and hence disabled, by default.

  // If you need to keep a complete archive of emails sent by ZendTo,
  // excluding the ones used to verify external senders,
  // put the archive's email address in here. It will be added to the
  // Bcc list of every relevant email sent. If you only want to archive
  // some types of messages, simply apply some Inbox filters to the mailbox
  // that receives these archive copies.
  // To disable this feature, leave this set to ''.
  'archiveEmailAddress' => '',

Branden — Once you can confirm that this will do what you need, let Kevin and I know and I'll get a beta version released for you to try.

Cheers,
Jules.
On 02/04/2020 18:52, Kevin Miller via ZendTo wrote:
Brillian.  I like the BCC solution.  That should be really easy for them to do and they could have all they need and more for perpetuity!  I’m cc:ing my counterpart there; I can work with him to get them lined out on how this could work.

Thanks much.

...Kevin
--
Kevin Miller
Network/email Administrator, CBJ MIS Dept.
155 South Seward Street
Juneau, Alaska 99801
Phone: (907) 586-0242, Fax: (907) 586-4588 Registered Linux User No: 307357

From: ZendTo <zendto-bounces at zend.to><mailto:zendto-bounces at zend.to> On Behalf Of Jules via ZendTo
Sent: Thursday, April 2, 2020 9:12 AM
To: ZendTo Users <zendto at zend.to><mailto:zendto at zend.to>
Cc: Jules <Jules at Zend.To><mailto:Jules at Zend.To>; Kevin Miller <kevin.miller at juneau.org><mailto:kevin.miller at juneau.org>
Subject: Re: [ZendTo] Feature request...

EXTERNAL E-MAIL: BE CAUTIOUS WHEN OPENING FILES OR FOLLOWING LINKS
________________________________
Kevin,

Always happy to help out the emergency services. I've needed their help a few times in the past myself. I've never had to call the coastguard, mountain rescue or cave rescue, but I've used all the obvious ones. Our county police force even has a specialist animal rescue team (experts at getting cows out of ditches among other things!).

It looks pretty simple to write. It's basically a matter of logging new drop-offs in more detail (controlled by a preferences.php option that by default will switch off the extra detail). Then a new script run from a cron job that runs overnight, pulls the relevant info from the last day's zendto.log and sends a plain-text email of the details.

Or else I do it straight from the ZendTo database, which would probably be a cleaner solution, and that gets run as part of the overnight house-keeping cron job.

Can you find out exactly what information they want about each drop-off?
The obvious answer from what you've said is:
- Sender username
- Sender email
- List of real names of the files
- Date+time stamp of when the drop-off was created.

Other potential things they might want to add:
- List of recipient emails (if they mistyped an email address and later the state said "but we never got it", it makes working out why a lot easier)
- Checksum of each file (if calculated).

** There is a complete alternative to this:
How about if you could give an extra email address in preferences.php, and all "some files have been dropped off for you" messages were also Bcc-ed to that email address? Then you've got *all* the details you could ever want, and normally it just feeds into an "archive" mailbox of some sort. Then when the need arises, someone can look through the messages for the day they're interested in, or search them any other way they like using their email app.

Have a chat to them and see how they would like to go.
Personally, the extra bcc address quietly added is by far the easiest to implement, and would guarantee they had all the info about each drop-off that they might need. But it wouldn't be a neat little daily table of what was sent that day. Depends on how they want to use it, which is often different to how they think they want to use it. Imagine 6 months in the future: will someone really be reading that table every day? Or would an archive of the emails be more useful?

Cheers,
Jules.


On 02/04/2020 17:20, Kevin Miller via ZendTo wrote:
It’s not a show stopper but the Juneau Police department  is using zendto to upload evidence to share it with the state or some such thing and they want an audit trail to show what officer uploaded what file when.  But I can appreciate the privacy aspect which is equally important.  Both myself and the IT guy there think the way they’re going about it in a goofy way so I can just say it’s not a feature currently available and let it quietly fade into the background.

Thanks for all you do…

...Kevin
--
Kevin Miller
Network/email Administrator, CBJ MIS Dept.
155 South Seward Street
Juneau, Alaska 99801
Phone: (907) 586-0242, Fax: (907) 586-4588 Registered Linux User No: 307357

From: ZendTo <zendto-bounces at zend.to><mailto:zendto-bounces at zend.to> On Behalf Of Jules via ZendTo
Sent: Thursday, April 2, 2020 1:35 AM
To: ZendTo Users <zendto at zend.to><mailto:zendto at zend.to>
Cc: Jules <Jules at Zend.To><mailto:Jules at Zend.To>; Kevin Miller <kevin.miller at juneau.org><mailto:kevin.miller at juneau.org>
Subject: Re: [ZendTo] Feature request...

EXTERNAL E-MAIL: BE CAUTIOUS WHEN OPENING FILES OR FOLLOWING LINKS
________________________________
Kevin,

Please can I ask "why?"

That seems very intrusive to me, which is partly why I don't even log that information.

Cheers,
Jules.
On 01/04/2020 23:11, Kevin Miller via ZendTo wrote:

I have a user wanting a daily report via email on the previous day's drop-offs.  He says "We would need the Who, What and When.   This is just to document so and so officer dropped of files x,y,z at whatever time. "



I looked in zendto.log but it will note that Joe Blow dropped off 5 files, but not the specifics my user is looking for.  Thought maybe it might be a nice addition to a future release.





...Kevin

--

Kevin Miller

Network/email Administrator, CBJ MIS Dept.

155 South Seward Street

Juneau, Alaska 99801

Phone: (907) 586-0242, Fax: (907) 586-4588 Registered Linux User No: 307357







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