Alright s4nt0s, and everybody else, lets talk email!
I have been thinking a lot about the email issue and I have come up with a suggestion that I think would be a HUGE help in managing this, especially with the amount of projects I have. This is going to be a complete solution to the email issues involving broken/not-working/deleted accounts, blacklisting and updating, and even testing and adding a new one to a project. I hope something like it gets implemented, but who knows, it might be too much.
Here is how I want it to work, this involves a list of email accounts to be stored by the software.
1. Keep a database/list of email accounts that I can import (or add to by hand.)
This should be simple. Its a list of email accounts and server settings. This is storage, none of the ones in this list are currently in use by the software for a project. The window should let me mass edit the list, including deleting and changing server settings. It should also be able to test all the accounts (and I get to choose whether or not it uses proxies for this, it should default to "use proxies".) After a test run I should be able to remove all non-working emails from the list. This feature itself is pretty simple, and most of the code to do various pieces of this already exists (like testing emails.)
The biggest gain from this is the ability to buy big lists of accounts and import them. This saves a ton of work.
2. When building or editing a project I should be able to enter in specific settings for the project or choose a random email account from the list.
I would like to be able to build a project and have email automatically filled in and tested by the click of one button. It would pull from the list of emails from #1. When it pulls one from the list and uses it for the project it should remove it from the list. This will prevent it from being used again and it will keep the list management in #1 much easier, the list code wont need to know anything about which projects have which emails currently.
3. Per-project settings for the blacklist check, and auto-removal/changing.
Imagine if the software could check every X minutes/hours/days if the email address is broken (not working) or blacklisted. It could then automatically pull in a new one from the list. If you have this setup and there are no good ones left on the list it could do one of two things. Option one would be for it to stop the project and give you some sort of notice to tell you that you are out of emails. Option two would have it just keep running and do nothing when the list is empty.
When doing this it should make sure to check the email account for emails it needs to verify/confirm before it changes to the new one. So you dont miss out on any links.
4. Conclusion
In a perfect world I could import a few thousand emails and their settings, hopefully with some sort of mass editing for putting in the settings. I would then set my options on my projects and not worry about emails again for months.
