Support email notifications to users

[humphd]

We've tried doing email notifications in the past, and it wasn't done properly. I'd like to try again, and see if we can get the proper setup.

I spoke to ITS about how we should approach this, so that our mail won't be rejected by Seneca as spam:

You can send email from something@telescope.cdot.systems and use local mailer to queue the outgoing emails. You just have to add proper entries in your DNS server (i.e SPF record) to allow your server to be published a trusted sender for that domain, so it will not be treated as spam on the recipient side.

Do not attempt to deliver email directly to recipients from your application, as some recipient mail servers, such as our Seneca mail server, will always reject first attempts from new sender with a message like "temporary busy". This is to make sure it is a real mail system sending and not an automated mass spam, the real mail system will queue the email and will attempt to send it again later, then in the second attempt the email will be accepted. For the above reason if you send email directly to recipient from application, it will fail and most likely the application will not attempt to send it again, so you have to use local mailer which will queue and retry sending the email.

Based on this, it sounds like we need to:

• add proper entries in your DNS server (i.e SPF record) to allow your server to be published a trusted sender for staging and prod
• enable/use a local mailer queue
• add code to allow creating mail in the local mailer queue
• send email notifications as necessary

cc @manekenpix, we probably need to talk to @ctyler about the DNS changes? I'm not 100% sure what next steps are.

[PedroFonsecaDEV]

Following.

[manekenpix]

I was removed from this issue, but I'm still interested. @TueeNguyen you lead and I'll help if possible?

[TueeNguyen]

@manekenpix Definitely

[humphd]

This might become possible, since we're going to do it in Starchart. Seneca ITS is going to make us an SMTP account that we can use, which we can likely re-use here too. I'll follow-up when we know more from Starchart.