Drive Mail deprecated

How it works

Starting with v7.8.2 the Open-Xchange Server supports to send one or more non-inline file attachments not as physically attached files, but as a mail containing a share link actually providing access to the files.

Whenever such a mail is sent, an according folder is created in Drive module located under a special folder named according to selected display name. The name of the new folder is aligned to the mail's subject. All file attachments that are supposed to be available via the mail are put into that folder and a share link is created for that folder. That share link (along-side with other information) is prepended to the mail's text content.

Replaces the "publish on exceeded quota" feature

"Drive Mail" is a replacement for the former "publish on exceeded quota" feature. Setups which use the "publish on exceeded quota" feature need to be aware of

  • The uploadquota and uploadquotaperfile now do no more act as threshold, which controls when auto-publishing kicks-in. Those quota limitations do specify the user's upload limits. Regardless if a "Drive Mail" is composed or not. Hence, those settings need to be set to reasonable values
  • Existing Drive folders and Drive documents are not removed
  • Auto-deleting of expired published Drive documents does no more happen

Installation

This feature is included in open-xchange-core package. Thus, no additional packages are required being installed.

Configuration

An administrator is able to configure this feature through /opt/open-xchange/etc/mail-compose.properties file. All configuration options are config-cascade capable.

Enabling

The feature is enabled via com.openexchange.mail.compose.share.enabled property, which defaults to true.

If enabled and user holds sufficient capabilities ("infostore" and "share_links"), clients are allowed to signal that a mail is supposed to be sent containing a share link, rather than actual file attachments, through enhancing the JSON request body of the /mail?action=new call:

 {
  "from", ["Jane Doe", "jane.doe@somewhere.com"],
  ...
  "share_attachments": {
   "enable": true,
   "expiry_date": 1465219133000, <-- Specifies when share link is about to expire
   "password": "secret"          <-- Specifies an optional password access the share link
   "autodelete": true            <-- Specifies whether share expiration should also delete shared files
  }
 }

Display name

It is possible to change the display name of that feature according to customer needs through com.openexchange.mail.compose.share.name option. Default is Drive Mail.

Threshold

Since file attachments are not physically attached, but stored in Drive of sending user, a user can be forced to send a share link through specifying property com.openexchange.mail.compose.share.threshold. That option accepts a threshold, which is the total number of bytes of all file attachments that are allowed to be sent physically attached. Once exceeded the file attachments are made accessible via a share link.

External recipient locale

The option com.openexchange.mail.compose.share.externalRecipientsLocale specifies what locale to use when composing a mail containing share information for an external recipient.

This option either accepts special value user-defined (that is to choose sending user's locale) or a locale identifier according to RFC 2798 and 2068; such as en_US.

Share attributes

By default a user can optionally specify whether a share link has an expiry date and if (provided a expiry date is set) the associated folder is automatically deleted from Drive module if share link is expired.

An administrator can enforce, whether an expiry date and an accompanying auto-delete flag is required.

  • com.openexchange.mail.compose.share.requiredExpiration (default id false). If set to true, the user is required to specify an expiry date for the created share link. Otherwise sending the mail is rejected.
  • com.openexchange.mail.compose.share.forceAutoDelete (default id false). If set to true, the files/folder associated with the share will be automatically deletes once the share link expires.