Provide a centralized place to manage all mail

Yes! it would establish a conventional place for all mail applications in Drupal. If I wanted to create a contributed module that handles the publication (in this case distribution) of mail messages from my Drupal site and wanted to provide a place to configure that, I'd probably establish my own config group.

In this future Drupal where mail already has it's own config group, I wouldn't have to.

Theres a project in the Application queue for Swiftmailer #1174572: Swift Mailer module.

Ideally, a mailhandling system could be pluggable--much like the theme layer, or adopt portions thereof of work already completed for other mailhandling purposes.

Part of the problem, I believe, may stem from that the way we ant to work with email traditionally isn't thought about the same way we do, content. As such, it gets sporadically placed around the administrative tools of the site, on a case by case basis. Maybe we could get totally crazy here and create an Entity type which specifically represents a complete "e-mail" (prior to sending), so the email template either becomes a living, functional piece of content within the site.

Thoughts?

I made a new menu entry under "System" and started to put mail config stuff in there. Uploading what I have so far so we can work more people on this at the Copenhagen Code Sprint.

I am going to start fixing the tests.

Puts the User mail and Contact form mail settings into tabs under the centralised Mail area. This should also allow other modules to easily put items in this section.

Looks ok thus far, tested, no errors, no git complaints. Would put to RTBC, but I haven't checked if it is actually accessing/sending correctly.

I put a TODO in the menu item text because I am not too good with wording of that stuff. I'll see if I can get someone with more UX skills than me to take a look.

Hmm, is the solution to this really to make a separate admin section? I hope its not one of those area's in core no one ever goes to.

Bohjan, do you think it would make more sense somewhere else? If so where could that be?

This is indeed the missing admin section. Grouping together all mail messages makes a lot of sense.

I have not tested the patch, though.

Updated against head to use the new configuration management. Also removed the "TODO" from the description text.

#11: 1516952-centralised-mail-11.patch queued for re-testing.

#11: 1516952-centralised-mail-11.patch queued for re-testing.

Testbot was trying to access /checkout/install.php instead of /checkout/core/install.php

#11: 1516952-centralised-mail-11.patch queued for re-testing.

#11: 1516952-centralised-mail-11.patch queued for re-testing.

Needs issue summary

Issue summary written. Needs some inputs for the API section.

Issue summary written. Needs a review for the PHP API section from someone more knowledgeable with PHP.

I think this is a cool idea.

Unfortunately, after applying the patch in #22 and going to admin/config/system/mail from the UI, I get the following errors when going to the "general settings" tab:

Notice: Undefined index: system_mail_settings in drupal_retrieve_form() (line 773 of core/includes/form.inc).
Warning: call_user_func_array() expects parameter 1 to be a valid callback, function 'system_mail_settings' not found or invalid function name in drupal_retrieve_form() (line 817 of core/includes/form.inc).

The "users" tab with the email templates appears to work fine, although I haven't tested actually sending out an email.

Also, I believe that the copy in various places in the UI also should be changed to reflect the fact that the mail settings will be centralised now:

• The description text for Site Information says "Change site name, e-mail address, slogan, default front page, and number of posts per page, error pages."
• The description txt for Account Settings says "Configure default behavior of users, including registration requirements, e-mails, fields, and user pictures."

This patch needs to be re-rolled since the structure of module info file has been moved to yml

I have refactored the code to work with latest dev.

Issues with this patch:

• I couldn't find the link to "manage fields" and "manage display" on the contact categories.
• I'm not sure whether the "Require E-mail Verification" checkbox should be moved here or stay in the "Account Settings" page.
• I could't find good enough documentation on the Drupal 8 way of implementing Local Tasks, so I just did them with hook_menu.
• I added a file named MailForm.php to the system module, I'm not sure it obeys naming conventions.

PS: First core patch ever o/