[kevinh]

Originally Posted by jdj

Not sure this would work for me because it's being able to reply by email that my users are asking for. I suspect it would cause issues but I wouldn't want it on all forums....

Ok, so the RSS solution wouldn't help you, although if users are interested enough they will come to your forums to contribute.

You can enable EI for specific forums, but bear in mind there are other issues. One is that many people who are accustomed to a mail list will never come to the forums site, they only communicate with the site by email. Also EI does not work well when people try to post by email from a smart phone (i.e iPhone or Blackberry).

For some reason with iPhone mail EI cannot determine where the new post ends, so you will find that people will post their new message followed by the message they received by email. There are also character and formatting issues. Here's an example; http://www.bristolcars.info/forums/b....html#post2444

I was forever "tidying" posts up, otherwise the problem just snowballs when more people post by email.

Also, I found that the ability to post by email encourages people to make stupid posts, probably because it's just so easy to do.

People sometimes accidentally create a new thread by email when replying to an existing thread (because they change the subject line so EI doesn't know to append the post to an existing thread).

So EI has it's pros and cons. It may be a moot point anyway unless you can find someone to develop it for vB 4.x