Yes it sure would be.... I haven't seen any other forum software that does this, except one that has email and news group integration.... of course that package is over $1,500 and only runs on Windows. I really think this would give vB a big advantage over some of it's competitors.

-Chris

Which package are you talking about chris ?

Thanks,
Benj

my link in the first post i think :)

No, I don't think so, I think think Chris refers to a similar product.

Benj

WebBoard from O'Reilly http://webboard.oreilly.com/

Actually prices have gone up since I last looked.... $1800 for MS SQL and $3000 for Oracle. When I first started out I ran on a shared copy of WebBoard, but was very dissapointed with downtime every day and the performance was slow. Then when my host tried to upgrade from WB 3 to 4, they lost half of my posts and didn't have a backup.

-Chris

Ok, i see.
Well, I found these product forums not better than product like our VB.

The advantages of these product is that they have full of stuff integrated.... but as a standalone forum, for the same price, I would still get VB.

Benj

You don't need extra software. Wouldn't really be hard to implement either on Unix. Right now on most Unix systems have a program called mail installed. This program writes incoming emails to an indexed text file. By using PHP or C++ you can open the mail program, cycle through the messages and create new entries into the MySQL Database. The major trick will be reading the headers to determine if a message is a new topic or reply and attaching the replies to the proper thread.

I have done the reverse of this before, program reads a table in Oracle, sends each record as an email and them marks them as sent in the table.

The way I've seen this handled before is this: All emails go to an aliases like api@progresstalk.com for a new thread on the API forum, or chat@progresstalk.com to go into the Chit Chat forum. All new posts are sent out with a 'special' reply-to email address like api-34321@progresstalk.com, where API is the forum name and 34321 is the thread id. This makes it really easy to tell if it is a new post, or reply, and where it should be posted to.

-Chris

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Chris Schreiber

Quote:

The way I've seen this handled before is this: All emails go to an aliases like api@progresstalk.com for a new thread on the API forum, or chat@progresstalk.com to go into the Chit Chat forum. All new posts are sent out with a 'special' reply-to email address like api-34321@progresstalk.com, where API is the forum name and 34321 is the thread id. This makes it really easy to tell if it is a new post, or reply, and where it should be posted to. -Chris

That makes sense. Only problem with that possibly would be if you want to do an "archive" ie send out 25 posts in one email. I guess each post on that email can have listed a special reply email address for it.

--

Other thing to think about is moderating posts, deleting posts and also members. I assume that everyone will have to register the same way and then can just use either option (with checking to make sure the email came from an address).

What would happen say if user x posts a new thread and a moderator deletes it because it is rubbish thread. But then someone replies to it by email? Sort of error checking that will have to be taken into account.

At least it is sounding like it is going to be possible to implement. Looking forward to it sometime.

other thing is i use qmail as opposed to sendmail. Although my path to sendmail somehow works by sending it through qmail (i am no sysadmin! and this was done for me) I wonder if that sort of thing will make a difference in this type of case.

Just another thought.