Future of the SimpleNews Module

This discussion is an extension of an IRC session with Sutha and others, with a goal of finding the best way forward.

Simplenews is in an unfortunate situation right now where it is OK for text newsletters but difficult for HTML, and also doesn't provide a good framework for going outside the box. The module needs to be small enough to be maintainable, but still capable of meeting all needs.

I believe we'll need to reorganize the module into different components to accomplish this.

Sending emails: Drupal core supports text emails, mailmime supports HTML reasonably well. However, mailmime doesn't work in a way that makes it easy for simplenews to send really good HTML emails, with carefully crafted raw text alternatives, etc. So, we will create a mail-sending API which simplenews can delegate the message construction and send to. This module would also be usable in custom projects for sending HTML emails, and also allow easy HTML replacements for emails generated by Drupal Core. This module will also accept plain text emails and do the delegation automatically, so that Simplenews, etc. doesn't need to worry about the contents of the email.

Scheduling emails sends: In all likelihood the Simplenews base module will need to handle this, but the email API module should make it easy. It may be possible to split into a simplenews sub-module.

Newsletter signup, subscription management, newsletter issue node type: Simplenews base module.

Newsletter statistics, bounces, etc. - a set of sub-modules for Simplenews. Enable what you need / want.

Email templating: Allow you to organize your html emails into regions and add blocks, just like with pages. This could be a separate module that requires the email API, which Simplenews will be only agnostic of (needs to accept a message body from Simplenews but also work for Drupal core emails).

Advanced Email Content: Email subject, multiple CCK fields for body (or other region) HTML, and a textarea for manually crafting a good plain-text alternative. It would need some way of mapping the fields and act on the mapping as the node is being converted into email content. Although this is primarily Newsletter functionality, it may not be simplenews specific.

Other custom email functionality support: Let's say you want to send a referral email when a custom form is submitted. You will establish an email template for your site, generate tokens, and render a node as an email using the tokens and template. This process should be painless.

As for mailmime: It doesn't appear that it was designed as an API, and Simplenews doesn't interface with it very well. There are also some other problems with it, since it doesn't easily allow you to wrap an email's body content in any HTML and the CSS support is messy. These problems don't really appear until you want to do something fancy, but when they do appear it's easier to roll your own multipart email formatter than use mailmime. Still, the mail API module would be based heavily on mailmime.

I am going to be doing a lot of the work myself for a project regardless (D6), but I'd like the the solution I end up with to be extensible to any other realistic need.