CUNY Academic Commons

Following up on our conversation last week, we need to make a decision about how outgoing email will be sent in the Reclaim environment. I see three options:

1. Continue to send email using PHP and the system mail program
2. Use a transactional provider
3. Use SMTP

Items 1 and 2 both require MX DNS changes. Option 1 will require special vigilance, since Reclaim IP addresses will be sending cuny.edu email (presumably transactional providers are more used to setting this sort of thing up). Option 2 also costs money.

So I think that option 3 is probably the best. Emails will continue to be sent through the Graduate Center, so there should be no DNS changes, and there should be no additional spam problems. The one hitch is that we'll need an email account that can be used for this purpose. We already have commons@gc.cuny.edu, but it's already in use for other purposes. We also have a gmail account we use for inbound RBE, but this is not a gc.cuny.edu account, so it will face spam issues. So I think we'll need to request a new account. Then we need to decide which WP plugin to use - there's a number of them that would probably be fine.

Reclaim's team has also recommended SMTP, for what it's worth.

Ray, can you think about the reasoning above and let me know whether it seems right? If so, what are our next steps?