Contrib.social

The future of the HTML Mail module

Open on Drupal.org →
Created on 4 February 2023, almost 2 years ago
Updated 21 June 2023, over 1 year ago

HTML Mail is currently on life support - it is minimally maintained and barely functional. But the biggest problem is that it is built around an obsolete and unsupported Pear package that can't be fixed.

There is clearly not enough community interest in developing and maintaining this module, and keeping it active as a project just saps effort from alternative solutions for HTML mail and wastes the time of people who install and use this module.

I propose merging the functionality of this module into the Mime Mail module, and providing an upgrade path for users of this module to move to Mime Mail. The old HTML Mail module would continue to be supported for D7, but for D9 and D10 use upgrading to Mime Mail would be required.

I have partial maintainer privileges for the HTML Mail module, and full privileges for the Mime Mail module, so I could accomplish a lot of this by myself, but I would absolutely need feedback from the community about what features in HTML Mail need to be ported to Mime Mail and I would need people to test and provide feedback on the proposed migration path.

This requires some work from me. The easiest thing for me would be to just stop working on HTML Mail and let it die, but I believe that isn't in the best interest of the community because there are still a lot of old sites using this module. I don't have the permissions to fix HTML Mail entirely, and I am not willing to go to the effort to try to do that because I see no future in this code. But I HAVE put a lot of effort into Mime Mail in the past few years and that has the potential to replace HTML Mail and be a better solution - PROVIDED that Mime Mail also gets some help from the community.

I would like to hear from other maintainers of HTML Mail whether this is something they can get on-board with, and whether they would like to participate in co-maintaining Mime Mail.

I would also like to hear from users of HTML Mail about what features of HTML Mail they rely on that aren't present in Mime Mail, so that I can work on adding that functionality to Mime Mail and creating an upgrade path.

But in any case, I don't plan to do anything unless there is some agreement that this is the right thing to do, because I don't really want to spend a lot of effort to do something that nobody cares about.

🌱 Plan
Status

Needs review

Version

3.0

Component

Code

Created by

🇺🇸United States tr Cascadia

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  • Issue created by @tr
  • Comment almost 2 years ago →
    🇨🇭Switzerland salvis

    Hi TR,

    Thank you for your post, for all the work you've put into HTML Mail so far, and for your willingness to continue with it!

    14 months ago my 32 year old daughter ( vsalvis → , BTW) died of breast cancer after a two-and-a-half year suffering. During those years I lost touch with the Drupal community and project, and even though I still run a few small D7 sites, I didn't manage to make the transition to D8.

    Personally, I've never used HTML Mail, but I've picked it up when Bob Vincent left, because it complemented my Subscriptions module. In the past I held a grudge against Mime Mail because its maintainer held it hostage and made people pay to lift her finger. AFAICS, you're doing a great job with Mime Mail and HTML Mail, and I wholeheartedly support your efforts to provide an upgrade path for the 27,000 sites still using HTML Mail module.

    Let's talk in email about what maintainer privileges you're missing.

  • Comment almost 2 years ago →
    🇬🇧United Kingdom Driskell

    I think key feature missing that stops our migration is ability to select "Use Frontend Theme" (or select a specific theme). Ideally it wouldn't be a select a theme - but just use the active theme.

    Overall it looks like Mime Mail might work better if it just had the above feature. At moment HTML Mail only handles HTML Mail well when you are using MIME. If that's off, all HTML is lost if you are using modules like Webform that support HTML. And if you are using the Mime option in HTML Mail, although it will work with Webform, it opens up issues with text mail, as you can't differentiate the two in the template.

  • Comment over 1 year ago →
    🇩🇪Germany Anybody Porta Westfalica

    Thank you very much @TR for creating this issue and thank you @salvis for investing your time into this for many years. All the best to you and your family.

    Regarding the future, I think it should be discussed to put all community efforts into https://www.drupal.org/project/symfony_mailer → for Drupal 8+

    It still feels quite complicated and unfinished, so we're still using Mail System + Swiftmailer → but surely it makes sense to use Symfony whereever possible and I think it would make more sense to have one stable community default instead of creating similar modules like in the past, which are all little maintained.

    So I'd really vote to have a look which features are missing in Symfony Mailer and invest the time there. Mime Mail is still alpha for Drupal 8 which is another good reason.

  • Comment over 1 year ago →
    🇪🇸Spain psf_ Huelva

    Today Mime Mail have ten times more installations that Symfony Mailer, I think that have more sense work in Mime mail.

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