You just send back an email to the user stating that the thread he/she has replied to has been deleted and/or closed depending on the situation.

PHP actually has an IMAP, &c module that would make it possible to do mail and news interfaces without too much work (for James and John, that is!).

a pop account would be enough.

now, the main issue here is - mail goes to pop account, but vB would not catch it at the same time. You would need a cron job to periodically check the pop account. However, that could mean that i email the list, someone posts in the meantime on the board itself, the email gets placed before the post.

What is missing is a way that every new mail goes directly to a script, which I have no idea how to do.

If that could be resolved, then this would be a easy to do hack.

The issue of new post or reply is easy - you would have the threadid in the subject line all the time.

This "thread id" in the subject line only works if you send out individual emails. This is not going to work for most boards.

A lot of egroups sites that i am intersted in have traffic of about 75 - 200 posts per day. Some of the lesser ones more around 25. No one wants 200 posts per day in their email box. They want maybe 4 emails with 25 posts.

Lots of these users are used to just hitting reply and sending a message, as there is no threaded strucuture they just make the title up as they go along.

If we do this batch mailing of say 25 emails (i think essential) then this is something that will have to change to keep the email structure. Personally i would want each post to have an email link by it as i think chris suggested with say popaccount34343@domain.com (with 34343 being the thread id). The subject title would then be the subject title of a post like you can do on the forum.

For new threads they would have to write the exact words new thead - Title in the subject line. This is to prevent getting hundreds of new threads from people just hitting reply. Either that or a new thread has to be sent to a different email box.

This is why 1 pop3 account will not work, need to be able to accept lots of different incoming email address, 1 for each thread.

Interested to here what john (via james :) ) thinks would be a good way to do this and what he actually thinks of the idea in the first place.

the pop mail still remains the problem, and most hosts don;t give unlimited pop3's.

You could always put the threadid tag at say the end of the message with a ---DO NOT MODIFY---

most accounts get unlimited email forwarding though into a pop3 account. That would be enough wouldn't it?

The thread343@domain.com really does sound like the best way to go.

I do think most of us have a catch-all account where as (anything)@ourdomain.com will go to our main pop3 account.

AH, right, forgot about the catchall. I guess most will have it.

I'm looking at some scripts written by people for Mailing List admin and seeing if I can convert one of them into this.

How would incoming spam be managed?

On a slightly different tangent, how well does vBulletin resolve for wireless Palm and Visor handhelds?

It might be interesting to experiment with an arrangement where someone using a synced handheld could subscribe to a specific forum and load up threads and posts, go about their day, respond on the PDA and transmit their responses next time they sync.

we could always WAP vBulletin!