Not one individual will take this project and finish it; the entire point of making it open-source is to appease customers who paid for it, mistakenly believing they were getting a 3.5 version, and never received the final version, only development builds as provided by the developer's license.

Instead, I expect quite a few developers to join in and assist each other (with my input as necessary) to develop the final product beyond what I could have done under the circumstances. Customers win because they will have paid $40 to $48 and gotten the final product, and what's more, the product beyond what was offered in the first place. New users win because they get a free, powerful, and community-driven web mail modification for their forums. I win as a result of the two factors just described.

The alternatives I considered:

1. Do nothing (always an option for any decision) and not look at the code ever again, just stating that the latest version is what's for sale, and that's it. That would piss off current customers, and there would be no future sales because vBMS would be incompatible from that point on with all vBulletin versions developed since.
2. Hire developers to continue, regardless of whether I broke even or made a small profit. I tried that twice, and it didn't work out.
3. Submit it to Sourceforge. I strongly considered that one, but I chose not to in order to restrict the codebase to vBulletin license holders, and to only expose the project to people in a vBulletin context.
4. Either give away or sell the codebase to Jelsoft. After consideration, they decided not to pick up the project at this time.
5. Submit it here. It would have the same benefits as submitting to Sourceforge, but would have greater exposure to vBulletin users.

You'll note that option #1 happened with HiveMail, vBMS's primary competitor, although I never planned the two to directly compete as I considered Hivemail to be a more full-featured product at the time, and it's standalone vs. vBulletin-powered. The same result happened: customers got pissed off, development didn't progress at all, and didn't get their money back. Hivemail hasn't been open-sourced to my knowledge, and from the posts I read, development is non-existent, and users are out far more than $40.

This solution, to reiterate, I chose to favor the community, not my tiny PayPal account and equally tiny checking account. This way, customers get a product beyond what they paid for, and future users are able to enjoy vBMS as well.

As for your discussion, Amy: I realize there could never be a dedicated forum for it (hosted here, that is; hosting it myself would not let me restrict access to vBulletin license holders). However, I can always try out the CVS server option. If you and others have alternatives, I'm more than happy to hear them. Anything to create an efficient collaborative environment, I'm all for.

Finally, I'd like this thread to be devoted to vBMS development, not arguments over the product's history or transition to open-source.

So, on that note, if somebody installs vBMS (and also to those who have tried using this version), let's start compiling a definitive list of bugs that need to be fixed.

A high-level list without specifics yet:

• Sending mail is not always reliable. It varies greatly depending on whether you try to send attachments. This is now because vBMS supports both attachments and HTML messages (along with RFC compliance of sending a plain text version of that HTML), so a multipart/mixed message is necessary. Some mail servers butcher those headers; I know under Windows and PHP, including the Comcast SMTP servers, the message would get butchered and never sent properly (despite PHP reporting success).
  
  If you can make a message that doesn't send properly, go back, check the option for "test the message without actually sending it", then copy and paste the output here; I suggest using the WYSIWYG editor here so it preserves the colors. Remember to censor out the important stuff (your e-mail address, for example), but keep the rest there, especially the headers and delimiters.
• Receiving mail does not happen automatically. It occasionally fails manually. First, we should get the manual process working, then the automatic, which should be trivial. To test mail manually, go to vbms_checkmail.php in your forums' root directory (not the one in /includes/cron which is the one that the vB cron system used to use). If you look at the top of the file, I recall there being a switch you can add to the URL to include output. If you leave off the switch, you can refer to the mail checking logs in the admin CP vBMS section.
  
  I suggest keeping it simple; just one user, no filters or anything fancy like that. Make sure you set up a catch-all account, nothing else like Outlook uses that account, and keep out things like attachments for now.
• The installer would fail for some users. I could never reproduce the problem, so the installer gives you an error message, post it in full detail. That XML error message is strange: try opening /includes/xml/vbms_installation_resources.xml in your web browser and make sure it doesn't give you any errors (if it does, the file might be corrupted because Firefox thinks its valid XML over here).
• Blank admin CP pages. I couldn't reproduce that all, but my suspicion is interference from other modifications the user installed. If you get blank admin CP pages, post a list of modifications you've installed.

As I posted yesterday, when I installed this version it did not create the vb options setting "vbms_checkmail_interval".

For me, I'm be more than happy to have more than one cron job showing in the cron manager.

I just think, given the complexity of the code, people are more likely to be able to fix the old cron way of doing things because that is how people are used to doing things and have managed to get cron working, so why not this mod, instead of having to learn how you have worked your new cron before even trying to work out how to fix it.

[high]* Slave shrugs ..
[/high]

Given that it is now open source, am I allowed to give the older beta to someone to have a look at?

I can post some earlier versions later (or just allow public access to the vBMS forum).

Either one would be cool :)

In fact, allowing access to the vbms forums might be the way forward, to allow coders to chat about (and release) versions before release here at vb.org ..

Just moving all discussion to the vBMS forums would be simplest, but the only thing holding me back is keeping out users who don't have vBulletin licenses. If Jelsoft provided an API for hand-chosen forums to keep out unlicensed users, that would be different, but they never will for customer privacy reasons.

Well .. people like vba and v3 arcade do it .. if I remember (it was so long ago that I signed up to their forums) they have a code string within a code quote on vb.org which has to be entered into the signup page of their forum ..

At least I think that's how they do it ..

That does give me an idea (that one you suggested is too insecure because if the code is leaked once, it's perpetually useless), involving a data exchange between vB.org and my server. I'll need to give it more thought.

filburt1, I don't know how to thank you for realeasing it for free. Thanks a bunch! But is this going to work on 3.6.0 as well?

Hey,

This is a great hack, and I desperatley want to use it. But during installation I get this error:
What should I do?

Thanks,
-Josh