I am interesting in one half of this. I am not so interested in the mailing list / subscriber management part.
The bit I would be interested in thinking about is: can we introduce an email templating system to Moodle core, so that all the emails that your Moodle site sends can be customised?
There are probably at least 2 parts to this:
- An overall template for HTML emails, so that they look pretty in a consistent way (e.g. some institutional branding.)
- A way to customise the email contents, using some fairly consistent placeholders. This one can be achieved to some extent using Language Customisation, but I am thinking of a dedicated admin screen.
We actually did the admin screen idea for one of our plugins, just using textarea admin settings, but that is not re-usable in other plugins. Here is an example:
Also, to make the 'Customise using lang strings' idea a bit more possible, in the past there have been changes made like MDL-84733 to make more placeholders availalbe to particular messages than are used in the default Moodle strings, but again, this is something being done in just one place, and it might be better to think about something that works for all the emails that Moodle sends.