TOPIC: preserve_recipients

Awesome plugin.

One request ... can you provide a mechanism for setting some of the optional parameters for the API's send method?

Specifically, I need to set preserve_recipients to false, in order to hide the full recipient list in the delivered email.

What would be nice would be the ability to both:

1) specify optional params in the global plugin settings, maybe as a simple JSON string like {"preserve_recipient":false, "tags":["some extra tags"]}, formatted as per the API spec.

2) provide them programmatically at run time, probably through $input->set() and get(). So as an extension author, I can do a $input->set('mandrill_send_options', '{"preserve_recipients":true,"tags":"foo bar"}') before I call J!'s mail API to send my mail.

-- hugh

PS, while adding the code to your ./mailer/mailer.php to merge in some options from $input->get('mandrill_send_options'), happened to notice a warning being pitched by PHP, abut the uninitialized use of $mAttachments at line 566:

if(count($mAttachments)) {

... which doesn't exist if there are no attachments, as it only gets set inside that if starting at 537.

-- hugh

Hey Hugh,

Thank you for helping with this!

I'm starting a new extension CMandrill, that will allow users to use custom email templates per component etc. Once I'm ready with that I'll have a look at the preserver_recipient option, but isn't this dangerous? As Far as I understand having this option will send the email with everyone visible in the cc field? This could lead to complains about privacy etc.

Daniel

Yes, exactly.

What I was saying was, your plugin as-is was preserving the recipients, i.e. NOT hiding them. I needed to hide them.

I think I'm behind the times though, as it looks like you have released CMandrill since I posted this, so I probably need to get up to date with where you are at with that.

-- hugh

Really? The plugin right now is not hiding the emails? Really? The plugin should actually send 1 mail to every cc recepient. And there should not be anything in the cc or bcc fields. If that is the case, there must be a bug.
You are of course welcome to send us a pull request:
github.com/compojoom/cmandrill

I'll make sure I'm up to date on the code and try again. When I originally posted, it was definitely not hiding the recipients on my emails, but you may well have changed the code since then.

Thanks for the quick responses.

Just FYI, I'm one of the authors of Fabrik, an application builder for Joomla, and CMandrill will be a godsend for many of our users, who want to do bulk mailings using Fabrik, but of course run in to all the usual issues with J!'s out-of-box mail options.

-- hugh