Major Additions - Email Integration (New threads/replies by email)

This mod is based off of the Mail Reply modification by Colin F to which I have obtained permission to rewrite and release.

This modification allows you to mimic email lists such as yahoo groups through your forums!

After installing this modification you will have new settings in your forum manager where for each forum you can enable this modification and setup a separate email address to use for each forum that you have this enabled for.

Just like how there is a separate email address for each yahoo group.

After doing so, members can subscribe to each forum that this mod is enabled for to receive notifications for new threads and replies.

Any posts in that forum, will be sent to them via email. (Example email attached below). The users can then reply to that email (which will then be processed and posted to the forums through the cron job that runs every 10 minutes), or they can send a new email to the email address and a brand new thread will be created!

Essentially mimicing an email list! Suddenly those users that hate forums, can still be dragged into the conversations and help keep the forum's activity level up!


BUGS!
These are the known bugs to date:

• Confirmed bug that email processing does not handle Japanese characters.

Unsupported Items
These are the items that are not currently supported:

• Some custom bbcode modifications will not display like they do on the forums in the html emails. Like glow, and the table mod.

TO UPGRADE

• Please see the file in the zip for upgrading!! If your upgrading from version 2.3.X you will need to reverse some file edits that are no longer nessecary!

NEW INSTALL

• See instructions in the zip file.

VERSION HISTORY!
(See the file in the zip for a complete history!)

• 2.6 Release
  • Bug Fixes
    • Joining an unmoderated public group will now auto subscribe you per the usergroup settings.
    • NO CONFLICTS with Instant Thread Subscription! See details in below post.
  • New Stuff
    • User Option Allow Auto Subscribe - This is an admin allowable, user option that let's the user choose to not be auto subscribed.
    • User Option not receive own posts - A new user option that lets them select to NOT receive their own posts via email.
    • Editted the phrase for the Auto Subscription script to tell people what to do if there are no listings.
    • Added error checks when saving a usergroup for if auto subscriptioin is entered with a forumid for a forum that does not have email integration enabled and also checks that the usergroup you are saing is entered in the forum manager as allowed to use email integration.
• 2.6.1 Release (BETA VERSION)
  • Hot Fix
    • It appears I was unseting a variable too soon. I've corrected this and it has resolved the issue with multiple posted replies on my test server.

Most of these will be slow to make it in til I know I've got the code to handle just about every type of email we could receive But in anycase, here are the ideas for future versions!

• End User Option to subscribe to just receive new thread emails, or receive all new thread & reply emails (current version does all new threads & replies).

Thanks to RedTyger, Bob Denny, Ed Kohwley and Chris McKeever for their additions and assistance with portions of this code.

Huge thanks also goes to the many individuals that have helped test various incarnations of this mod.

MAD PROPS TO: cgmckeever for a great quoting regex for the old format, and all the mods at www.4winmobile.com for helping test version 2.4 prior to release!!

You guys rock!

Please feel free to donate to my continued work on this modification!! It let's me spend more time on it!
Make a Donation!

Version 2.6 will work with both 3.6.8 and 3.7!

The #.X versions are the solid tested versions.

The #.X.X versions are the beta versions. New features and bug fixes will be worked in there and then when I have a solid version it'll be released as the next #.X

Thank you!!

~ Cyricx

[rlopez]

I have this mod installed and have modified it to work with moderation. When a moderator approves a post the emails are being sent using the mailqueue. There are roughly 700 users who are setup for instant email notification for the forum. My site is then slow and unresponsive until all the emails in the mailqueue have been sent.

Has anyone had similar issue or possible fixes? I did not see any previous posts relating to this but might have missed them considering there are 60+ pages of posts on this thread.

Thanks

[toivo]

Originally Posted by toivo

Here is a rough quick-fix of patches to EI Mod to support moderated forums, cloned from the existing code of EI Mod. The patch modifies emailintegration.php and two of its plugins, adds two custom hooks to moderate.php and installs a product with four plugins.

In limited testing under 3.6.8 this patch allowed moderation from the Admin Control Panel, Moderator Control Panel and also inline moderation

Please note that the 3.8.4 version of this patch (at https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?p=1980256 post #234) incorrectly adds the signature of the original author of the thread to moderated replies sent by email, instead of the signature of the poster of the reply.

As a workaround, you can remove the signature from the email template for replies. The users seem to have a signature in their emails in any case. I am using the old format - by popular demand.

[gamingaccess]

Originally Posted by amphicar770

Looks like Cyricx has not been on-line here since September. That is not a good sign!!

I can only ibegin to imagine the time and skill that must go into developing something like this mod. I made 2-3 contributions over the past 2 years. I do hope other users have done the same, it is critical to encouraging continued development and support.

So do you know if this plugin or a similar plugin is developed for new latest versions of vBulletin?

vBulletin 3.8 continues to release patches and updates, and vBulletin 4 was released.

I will really like to know if there is a similar plugin like this in active development

Thanks a lot

[toivo]

Originally Posted by rlopez

I have this mod installed and have modified it to work with moderation. When a moderator approves a post the emails are being sent using the mailqueue. There are roughly 700 users who are setup for instant email notification for the forum. My site is then slow and unresponsive until all the emails in the mailqueue have been sent.

Has anyone had similar issue or possible fixes? I did not see any previous posts relating to this but might have missed them considering there are 60+ pages of posts on this thread

I run this mod with my moderation patch in one unmoderated and one moderated forum under vB 3.8.4. I noticed the same slowness with 200 users, email batch size 100. After our mail proxy server (MailEnable free version) rejected 16 valid addresses without giving an error code, I reduced the batch size to 20 and have not seen rejections since. The site also seemed to become responsive again quicker after the moderated message has been approved.

[jdj]

I'm running 4.0.3.

Any news on if this mod will be developed for 4.0.3?

[Jah-Hools]

Could moderators or admin somehow use this as an admin accessible only feature?

To help them admin / moderate quickly via email? (mobile phones, avoiding using the browser)

I daydream that might have minimal server load - and keep the rest of the membership looking at banner ads etc..

Anyone doing that..?

Selective user groups and forums only..?

Sort of a VIP only service?

Thanks in advance..

[jdj]

My interest in this is because the people who use vbulletin.org or vbulletin.com are not representative of people in the wider world. Lots of those people can just about use an email client and email and a mod like this would be a stepping stone into online forums, to get them engaged with something better. Also, lots of people now use handhelds of one sort or another that are quite capable of dealing with email and SMS, even though browsing on them is much less of a positive experience than browsing from a netbook, laptop or desktop of some kind, especially if you are using mobile broadband, which is often slow meaning that pages load slowly even if you can send and receive emails. So the option to be able to contribute to an online discussion you are interested in wherever you are is still a way of keeping people engaged with you.

[vilhiem]

Any news on whether this will work with vB4 ...?

Thanks!

[jdj]

I have previously asked the same question. I tried it with 3.8.4, couldn't quite get it to work consistently, then moved to vB4. I contacted the developer who sent me a polite and apologetic reply along the lines of him having to develop other more popular mods first. I don't think the issues were insurmountable; it was something to do with email parsing.

[skippybosco]

Perhaps we can pool resources and pay to get the issues resolved by the developer to ensure support for vB4+