Agenda email problems

Hello, again. Some of our meeting TMODs are helping me to test features of the website agenda. We noticed for our 6/18/15 meeting that replies sent to agenda notifications were not being received by the TMOD despite proper agenda settings (to my knowledge). I believe this was the first TMOD to use this email feature, which is why the problem was not previously identified.

The TMOD emailed the 6/18 agenda to all club members, and the From line of his received message showed his name followed by "(agenda-1260@toastmastersclubs.org)." When club members replied to that message, their message To line showed 'agenda.495811-1260@toastmastersclubs.org' which accurately reflects the agenda number for the 6/18 meeting (direct link is 1260.toastmastersclubs.org/agenda-495811.html ). They did not receive a sent-message error; however, the TMOD never received those responses...and he checked his Spam folder to make sure. I double-checked that I had the correct email address for him in the membership manager, and I also double-checked the global agenda email settings--which are set up so that replies to agenda notifications are received by the VPE *and* Toastmaster. The VPE didn't receive the messages either, btw. Apparently, they just disappeared into a black hole somewhere.

I replicated this error earlier today after creating a fake 7/1 agenda ( 1260.toastmastersclubs.org/agenda-533898.html ) with myself as TMOD. I added myself to a couple roles and noticed that the notifications for when someone takes or drops a meeting role worked as set up (also to be received by the VPE and TMOD). From the 7/1 agenda page, I also emailed the agenda to just the TMOD, which worked. However, when I replied to this message (with message going to 'agenda.533898-1260@toastmastersclubs.org'), nothing happened again. I thought the agenda email alias would redirect replies to the TMOD and VPE.

May I have some help with resolving this problem, please? Thanks,

Melonie

The weak point in all this is how the agenda determines who is the Toastmaster for the meeting in question. The determination is currently done via a pattern match on the role title. If the role title matches what the system expects for the Toastmaster role, then it will properly find the Toastmaster. If not, then it won't. (I did not create that code, but I intend to change it in the future.)

BTW, excellent analysis and determination of the meeting number from the email address. A lot of users miss that.

Let me take a look at your agenda to make sure the Toastmaster can be found.

Thanks and thanks!

Ok, it is finding your Toastmaster correctly: Jun Zhao (I ran the TM search code separately.)

Checking the email logs... I am not seeing Jun in the "To's" .

OK re the privacy issue. I looked at the log, and I see what you mean. Only the agenda alias shows up for To, but not Jun's direct email address. The emails definitely did not redirect to him, though it looks like they did redirect correctly to the VPE. Hmm....

Ok, it is finding your Toastmaster correctly: Jun Zhao (I ran the TM search code separately.)

Ok, I take it back, it was not finding Jun as the Toastmaster for the agenda replies... There were actually two different pattern matches in use, one for finding the TM for agenda replies and one for determining editing rights for a particular agenda. The editing rights one was more liberal and was correctly determining your role starting with *Toastmaster Of The Day* as the toastmaster role. However, the agenda replies pattern was more restrictive and was not correctly finding that role as being the toastmaster. For most clubs, this would work fine... however, because of your role title, it was not working consistently.

This is a good example of why using pattern matching for determining who is the Toastmaster is a bad implementation that I hope to ditch in the future. Using pattern matching essentially restricts your freedom to call your meeting roles whatever you want.

In any case, I changed the code so that the agenda replies code just uses the same mechanism to determine the toastmaster as is used for determining agenda editing rights. It looks like it is working consistently now.

So, I think this is resolved--please confirm on your end. Thank you for bringing this to my attention.