CUNY Academic Commons

Hi Marilyn,

Can I ask why you'd prefer the other email? Is it for visual reasons? Or is it because you want to be able to hit Reply and have the email go to the right place? (I ask because they're different mechanisms.)

Also, can you say more about how the emails are being sent? Are they newsletters? Various parts of WP are independently responsible for sending their own emails, so it's helpful to know exactly where it's coming from.

So that the reader can hit Reply and have the email go to the right place.

No , not newsletters, these are just subscriber notifications of when a blog post goes up.

Marilyn - do you know which plugin you all are using to send out those emails? It looks like there's quite a few installed on the Commons. Think you could look through your activated plugins list for the likely candidate?

Daniel -
Sorry I didn't see this until now. I'm actually not talking about my site here. At this point, I'm the person who checks the commons@gc.cuny.edu. Whenever anyone sets up a blog or group, the automatic "From" is set to commons@gc.cuny.edu. So I see emails like these two:

1) From: QRFellows [mailto:QRFellows@sps.cuny.edu] 
Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2016 5:04 PM
To: Academic Commons, CUNY <commons@gc.cuny.edu>
Subject: Re: QR Contact: Remedial math

Hi, Cecile. Unfortunately, this service is only for students who are enrolled at the School of Professional Studies. Sorry to hear that your son is having difficulties with math. BMCC surely provides their own tutoring and other services for students so we recommend that you contact the tutoring center or advising or other such office at BMCC and they should be able to direct you to the proper channels.
Best of luck to your son and hope you are able to find the support he needs at BMCC.

Biwei

________________________________
From: CUNY Academic Commons <commons@gc.cuny.edu>
Sent: Thursday, September 29, 2016 2:10 PM
To: QRFellows
Subject: QR Contact: Remedial math

From: Cecile Gibbons
Subject: Remedial math
Email: gibbonscecile@ymail.com
Message Body:
My son Andre is a junior @ BMCC and learning disabilities when it comes to learning complex math concepts & needs more one-on-one support . He struggled with the remedial math twice. His GPA dropped. He is on special academic probation this fall & is going to school on a part-time basis & must get a minimum grade of a B to pass all his classes and stay in school. He will take the math before he graduates. I would like to know if you could help tutor him in this course in person. I am reaching out to you because my son is intimidated by math and doesn't really ask for help. Please let me know if you are able to help him or if you know another tutor that would be interested thank you Cecile Gibbons
--
This e-mail was sent from a contact form on SPS Quantitative Reasoning Resources (http://qrfellowssps.commons.gc.cuny.edu)

2) From: The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy [mailto:admin@jitpedagogy.org] 
Sent: Friday, September 30, 2016 12:10 PM
To: Academic Commons, CUNY <commons@gc.cuny.edu>
Subject: Re: submission inquiry

Dear Jen Jarson and Lora Taub-Pervizpour,
Please find below the response from our Issue Editor (who has also edited the Assignments section):

I think these are the main things that differentiates Assignments from regular submissions:
• Length. typically, Assignments submissions are no more than about 1000 words.
• Style. we like when these are narrative pieces, telling the story of the Assignment, implementation, and outcome, with links to pertinent documents like rubrics, instructions, student work, etc. I think the regular submission pieces are more aligned with "journal article", while an Assignment submission does not adhere as tightly to that, and we encourage these to be more reflections on what took place, why the authors did what they did, and how students responded.
Please let me know if you have any additional questions, and thank you for considering JITP as a venue for your work.
Best,
Laura

--
Laura Wildemann Kane
Managing Editor, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy
jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu
twitter.com/JITPedagogy

On Fri, Sep 23, 2016 at 11:15 AM, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy <commons@gc.cuny.edu> wrote:
From: Jennifer Jarson and Lora Taub-Pervizpour <jarson@muhlenberg.edu>
Subject: submission inquiry

Message Body:
Dear editors,

We were delighted to see your recent call for submissions. We have a manuscript that we would like to submit. Our manuscript describes our experience developing, implementing, and assessing an assignment to advance students' digital literacy development in the context of a New Information Technologies course. Issues of voice, agency, identity, and process are at the center of our work.

We have looked closely at your guidelines for authors, but still feel uncertain about whether our manuscript is more appropriate for the short-form Assignment category or the longer-form articles in the Issues category. We are open to both forms of peer review. Can you advise us on other considerations that differentiate the two categories and how we might best proceed?

Thanks for your time and thoughts.

Sincerely,
Jen Jarson and Lora Taub-Pervizpour

--
This mail is sent via contact form on The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy http://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu

Daniel, does that help? The person contacting the blog/group has their inquiry go directly to them, but then the response comes to commons@gc.cuny.edu. I am re-directing them, but wonder if there's a way to have the commons@gc.cuny.edu address be suppressed, so that the responders reply to the inquirers. (I think those who are paying attention do!) I'll send other examples when I can.

Oh okay I see the issue now, or at least one of them. Thanks for clarifying, Marilyn.

The way that Contact Form 7 works, it doesn't automatically set the "Reply-To" address to the email of the person filling the form. That has to be done under the "Additional Headers" section of the admin screen for the form, using the Reply-To tag.

Boone - one option would be to hook up some javascript to automatically enter a good Reply-To address (which would be the address of the person filling out the form), and hope that site admins won't change or remove it, or will know what they're doing if they do. I bet that'd work in most cases. Another option would be to try and hook into the plugin to add some kind of checkbox that says something like "Replies to emails from this form should go to the person who filled it out," and then use that info to add in the additional Reply-To header on form save.

I don't think this'll fix the original problem described in the ticket though - that's an issue with a different plugin, whichever one(s) people are using to send out email alerts about new posts or other things. I'm not sure the best way to tackle that, though. Let me know what you think, Boone!

I started digging into CF7's codebase to try to understand why it'd set the network admin email as the from address. Then I remembered that, some time ago, we wrote some filters that force the From email address on all emails going through wp_mail(). See wp-content/mu-plugins/cac-functions.php, cac_mail_from_name().

The backstory is at https://redmine.gc.cuny.edu/issues/2152#note-18. I've CCed Ray here in case he can cast his mem'ry back this far.

In any case, Dan, this may be a starting point for the CF7 issue.

I don't think this'll fix the original problem described in the ticket though - that's an issue with a different plugin, whichever one(s) people are using to send out email alerts about new posts or other things

Could you say more about this? It looks like the emails quoted by Marilyn are coming from contact forms.

I realize now that both of those examples are indeed from contact forms, but here's an example of one that isn't:

From: PhD Program in History Commons Site [mailto:commons@gc.cuny.edu]
Sent: Friday, October 07, 2016 9:39 AM
To: History Program Office <history@gc.cuny.edu>
Subject: Marilyn Weber wrote a new blog post Brooklyn College conference on debt and slavery 19-20 May 2017 in the group PhD Program in History: [CUNY Academic Commons]

.

Marilyn Weber wrote a new blog post Brooklyn College conference on debt and slavery 19-20 May 2017 in the group PhD Program in History:
The Cost of Freedom: Debt and Slavery

A conference in the Fredric Ewen Series on Civil Liberties and Academic Freedom, 19-20 May 2017

Brooklyn College, City University of New York

The rhetorics of freedom and liberty permeate contemporary and historical political discourse. This language and its associated symbols is invariably positively connoted from the perspective of the speaker and the presumed audience. However, the associated values and defining principles shift dramatically in each social context. In short we can all agree freedom is good, but we cannot agree what it means to be free. One of the key sites of contention in such discourse is what needs to be sacrificed in order to achieve liberty and what costs are associated with the preservation of freedom. The valuation of liberty is directly linked to whose freedom is prioritized and who is seen as bearing the associated costs. All of this is especially true any discussion of slavery.

The aim of this conference is to bring scholars from numerous disciplines into conversation across the historical timeline. Just as freedom and liberty are slippery concepts, so are ideas of debt, value, and payment. But rather than simply viewing these terms as rhetorical devices that make freedom seem worthwhile, we deploy debt, value,and payment as analytical tools for understanding how freedom works – while also keeping in mind that these are concepts that themselves demand investigation. These ideas unite the discourses of freedom and liberty, from ethical and economic discourses, which describe freedom as either physical labor or a mental activity, as well as the language of religion and science. Often our innumerable ways of assessing value bleed one into another, especially in conversations regarding individual and shared liberties.

By explicitly juxtaposing the different methodologies used in asking “what does freedom cost?” from Greco-Roman antiquity to the present, we hope to explore overlapping areas of research and help expand the existing conversations in each discipline. In addition to providing vocabularies, practices and theories of freedom that we still use today, Ancient Greece and Rome provide many examples of peoples who lacked freedom but strove to obtain it, including slaves, women and conquered peoples. By simultaneously examining the Greco-Roman antiquity and modernity, we bring to light recurrent historical patterns of the costs that people have and continue pay for freedom.

Our ultimate goal is to produce a rigorous edited volume of the most substantial and unified conference contributions for publication by a major university press.

Our confirmed keynote speakers include, Orlando Patterson (John Cowles Professor of Sociology, Harvard University), Saidiya Hartman (Professor, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University) and Deborah Kamen (Associate Professor, Classics, University of Washington).

Liv Mariah Yarrow
Associate Professor, Classics Department

View/Reply
________________________________

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Thanks, Marilyn! My guess is that the root cause is similar: we're forcing outgoing emails to have commons@gc.cuny.edu as the From field. We probably need some more fine-grained logic here.

Thanks, both. I know there's no quick fix. Today I had another one that looks like it's not a contact form:

From: Robert Cowan [mailto:rcowa@hunter.cuny.edu]
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2016 4:22 PM
To: Academic Commons, CUNY <commons@gc.cuny.edu>; Robert Cowan <rcowa@hunter.cuny.edu>
Subject: Re: New update in "CUNY Assessment Council" [CUNY Academic Commons]

Hi Robyn,

The only response seems to be yes, but I can’t make it this time, which is why I haven’t RSVPed. Perhaps we want to adjust it so that one can respond yes or no.

Have a lovely weekend,
Rob

—
Robert Cowan, Ph.D.[hunter-cuny.academia.edu]
Acting Assistant Dean for Program Development, Assessment, & Review | Hunter College
Professor of English | Kingsborough Community College
The City University of New York
695 Park Avenue, 815 Hunter East
New York, NY 10065
(212) 650-3045 | rcowa@hunter.cuny.edu
Executive Assistant: melissa.torrella@hunter.cuny.edu

From: CUNY Academic Commons <commons@gc.cuny.edu>
Date: Thursday, October 13, 2016 at 12:23 PM
To: Robert Cowan <rcowa@hunter.cuny.edu>
Subject: New update in "CUNY Assessment Council" [CUNY Academic Commons]

.

New announcement by Robyn Gertner in CUNY Assessment Council

Dear Council Members - a final reminder to RSVP for this week's council meeting:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfndGR3U2vgXnKFhSZuEUSeAGZ7BKOclnlUGKD4G6b_xzy4xA/viewform

-------
You received this message because you are a member of the group "CUNY Assessment Council" on the CUNY Academic Commons. Visit the group: http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/groups/cuny-assessment-council/

Email sent October 13, 2016 @ 12:23 pm
 For any requests, please contact support@cunycommons.zendesk.com

Marilyn, this last report appears to be a separate issue (to do with message recipients rather than "From" addresses). I've opened #7614 to track it.

Sorry, reviving again with the same complaint from user Rukshana Jalil:

I am using the Newsletter Plugin to send weekly event updates to my subscribers. However, when I send the emails, the "From" section displays CUNY Academic Commons as the sender (see attached screenshot). Is there a way to change this to reflect my program name (ie. American Studies <americanstudies@gc.cuny.edu> so that recipients have a clear idea who the newsletter is coming from?

Starting to look through this now.

Boone - do you think it might be worth flipping the logic on the mail_from_name() function, so that instead of defaulting to changing the name, it checks to see if it's actually GES sending a digest before filtering? It might be easier to write it around that then maintaining a list of exceptions.

I've got an ugly workaround for the Newsletters plugin specifically:

It creates a global variable, $wpml_message, that it only populates in its execute_mail() function. So I added tests for $wpml_message non-emptiness to the cac_mail_from_name and cac_mail_from functions. There's probably a better way to do it by making a new function using an action hook and remove_filter, which would be easier to maintain, but I just meant it as a proof of concept. Is this the kind of thing you think we'll need to do?

Boone - do you think it might be worth flipping the logic on the mail_from_name() function, so that instead of defaulting to changing the name, it checks to see if it's actually GES sending a digest before filtering? It might be easier to write it around that then maintaining a list of exceptions.

I think that in order to be able to make a judgment about this, it'd be helpful to have a high-level categorization of the primary email types on the Commons. It'd look like this:

1. WP core emails (password resets, etc)
2. BP core emails (you have been invited to a group, etc)
3. BPGES emails
4. Newsletters plugin
5. Mailpoet
6. ... other plugins

Then, get a sense of what we want to see as the From address in each case. It could turn out that flipping the logic around is a more effective way to do it, but it's hard to know without having the info organized somehow. Do you think you'd be able to take a first swing at this?

It creates a global variable, $wpml_message, that it only populates in its execute_mail() function. So I added tests for $wpml_message non-emptiness to the cac_mail_from_name and cac_mail_from functions. There's probably a better way to do it by making a new function using an action hook and remove_filter, which would be easier to maintain, but I just meant it as a proof of concept. Is this the kind of thing you think we'll need to do?

Yes, this is the kind of (terrible) thing I was imagining. I have a feeling that something like this is going to be necessary in at least some cases, whether we override-by-default (as we currently do) or not.

I'm going through my old tickets. I think this can be closed.