README

Pen-pal letters between members of a Flarum 2 forum that take time to arrive. The farther apart two members live, the longer the journey: a letter from Lagos to Ontario takes about four days, one across town still takes half a day. Then it's theirs to open.

What members get

Write a letter to any member, from the Slow Mail page, a pen pal, or "Write a letter" on their profile. Choose a stamp from an original set (a lighthouse, a whale, northern lights, a teapot…, or a "home" stamp with your own country), write, send.
The journey. With Member Map, the time comes from the distance between the two members' places (the admin sets the speed, a minimum and a maximum). Without it, or when either isn't on the map, a set time.
Envelopes with a postmark from the sender's country or region (never a city), the stamp they chose and the date it was sent.
Outbox: every letter on its way, drawn as a little journey with an ETA. "Delivered" when it gets there.
Inbox: envelopes that have arrived. The first time you open one, the flap lifts and the letter slides out.
Reply to keep a correspondence going: the reply makes its own journey.
Pen pals: everyone you've exchanged letters with, and every letter between you.
Looking for a pen pal: opt in with your interests and where you'd like them to live (anywhere, your country, your continent, another continent), and get matches, best first.
Notifications only when a letter arrives ("A letter from Lena has arrived"), never before. Senders get "delivered".

Private, really

Letters are between two members. They're encrypted before they're saved, with a key kept in storage/slow-mail/ and never in the database, and there's no admin view of them.
Report this letter: a recipient can show one letter to the moderators on purpose (and stop letters from its sender). That letter's words go to a moderators-only Reports list, and nothing else they've written or received does. Moderators get a notification that says nothing of the letter. Letters from a sender who has since been suspended, or lost Slow Mail, are returned instead of delivered.
A letter on its way doesn't exist for its recipient: not in any page, API answer, search or notification until it arrives.
Travel times can't give away where someone lives. A distance is only used when each member can already see the other on Member Map, at the precision each chose (city, region or country). It's then rounded to a band hundreds of kilometers wide and jittered by up to a band either way, the same every time for the same two places, so sending again doesn't help. The tests check that any travel time fits at least two whole bands of distances.
Blocks are respected both ways (Slow Mail's own, and Parley's), and so are "who can send me letters" (everyone, only people who've had a letter from me, nobody), fof/byobu's "block private discussions", Parley's "who can message me" and flarum/messages. A refusal never says which.
Rate limits: letters a day, new people a day (where spam comes from), letters on their way.
GDPR (flarum/gdpr): a member's own export has their letters; a moderator's export of them has counts and dates only. Erasure removes every letter they wrote or got.

Install

composer require ernestdefoe/slow-mail
php flarum migrate
php flarum cache:clear

Letters are delivered by Flarum's scheduler every minute. On forums without it, they're delivered on the next visit after they're due.

Back up storage/slow-mail/ along with your database: without its key, letters can't be read.

Settings: speed (km a day), shortest and longest journey, the journey without Member Map, letters a day, new people a day, and the sidebar link. Permission: "Write and receive Slow Mail letters" (members by default).

Links

MIT licensed.

ernestdefoe / slow-mail

Package info

Security

Fund package maintenance!

Statistics

README

What members get

Private, really

Install

Links