[dpark]

Heya,

I'm also new to vBulletin, I picked up a license very recently and have been committed to this path, but unfortunately, I think mail2forum+phpBB is exactly what I wanted. Oh well, time to see if I can replicate its functionality on vBulletin instead.

I've been trying to accomplish exactly the same thing as you but with one difference: I don't want to use an external mailing list manager like you do, I want vBulletin (plus hacks/add ons) to be the mailing list manager. mail2forum looks like it can operate that way (with phpBB). Basically, because I want to tie mailing list membership to vB usergroup membership (and when people change their email addresses in the user CP, I want that to be reflected when people send emails to the list / post to the forum).

What I've been trying to start with is the vanilla vB 3.0.7 plus the NNTP gateway mod (https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=65152). Unfortunately, this assumes an external mailing list manager (it retrieves emails via a POP connection and sends them out to a single address--the list address). I've managed to hack it a bit so that it handles emails over stdin when called on the command line (like a normal mailing list manager). That way it doesn't have to poll a silly POP account, it can just be called each time an email is received. The harder part is to get it to send new forum posts to every person in a specified vB usergroup that we somehow tie to a forum. At some point, I'll also have to hack the vB usergroup system so that 1) usergroup leaders can add / remove users w/o asking, 2) perhaps add some sort of invite system.

But part of the thing that's slow for me is that it's just taking a while to learn vBulletin--both its internal code structure, for which there is little documentation, as well as its out-of-the-box capabilities (for example, apparently users can subscribe to forums.. but instant emails are not an option for subscription, only daily/weekly digests.. and users can't be subscribed to forums by forum leaders... and forum leaders don't exist, this is why I'm trying to go the usergroup-tied-to-forum route. I still also can't figure out why vB makes a distinction between "primary" and "secondary" usergroups, but it seems ignorable for now). At the moment, I haven't made much progress at all.

Anyway, if you want to use an external mailing list manager, just use NNTP gateway, it probably does most of what you want. I'll just keep hammering at this myself..