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

[radarhunter]

can someone help me install this mod please......... especially the point

7. Create a new mail box.....

i`ve uploaded the files could someone having a few minutes free help me out....

[Cyricx]

Do you host your own server, or do you pay a host to take care of your site?

if you pay a host, ask them to setup a pop3 email address for you

You'll need to also know the stuff you need to access the pop3 remotely, which will be a url like mail.yourdomain.com and your username and password

Then using those settings, you can try the various connection types, or ask your host which it will be.

Be sure to check in your Admincp -> Maintence -> View PHP Info to be sure you have IMAP compiled

Check the first post for details!

[Tralala]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

They have to subscribe to the forum, just like they had to with RedTyger's modification

When they go to subscribe to the forum there is a new option for "Instant Notification by Email".

This way people that hate mailing lists don't have to mess with them, but those that want it, can select it

That option will only show up for forums that have the email integration activated. Other forums will show just the usual forum subscription selections.

Okay, thanks for this explanation.

I'd like to make a feature request, at least with the "greenest" of users in mind... you know, the ones who have never used forum software, let alone vBulletin with all of it's options. The ones who are intimidated by the switchover and want it to just work via email "the way it used to with Yahoo." I know it sounds silly, but walking them through going into each forum, one by one, and subscribing in this way, is a bit counterintuitive.

Would it be possible for there to be an option in the UserCP instead, for users to be able to activate "email integration" for each available forum? Ideally the admins themselves could turn this on as a default, or turn it on for users who don't know how. Right now, there's no way to set a default and no way for admins to do it for users, without logging in as that user and doing it manually per each forum.

I'd love an easier way for this to be used on a forum of complete forum n00bs, is all.

Thanks for your great work on this, Cyricx.

[Cyricx]

We are totally on the same page.

Right now I put a dirty little link on my forumhome page with "Posts by email" in the forum description box for the forums that have email integration enabled but it looks very tacky so I didn't include it in the release til I figure out something better.

I was thinking either a separate page that lists them like you mention.

Or some kick ass way to note which forums people could do it on through an icon or something on the forum home page, that was super easy to understand. Clicking it takes you to the forum subscription for that forum

I'm so back and forth on how to make it more simple while still looking and working great.

Like the old saying goes... Keep It Simple Stupid

[Tralala]

Good to hear your feedback and thanks, Cyricx. Looking forward to seeing what you come up with; I trust ya.

[Corys8646]

great job on this mod! been looking for something like this for a while.

got it installed today and have been testing it out..

the Formatting on my emails seems to not be right, but not sure if it's my client (thunderbird) or something else. I'm getting HTML code, but it's rendering as text

the header on the email is:

Content-Type: text/html
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
X-Priority: 3
X-Mailer: vBulletin Mail via PHP

I can view other HTML email just fine...

any ideas?
thanks again for a great mod

[Corys8646]

I just noticed one more thing, when trying to create a new thread or reply to a thread via email, the subject of the email is being entered at the message and the actual email body is being dropped off. (which explains why I was getting the message too short error previously when it wasn't)

[moonray]

Thanks for this extremely useful plugin.

On my domain, I use the GMail domain email services and not the server based SMTP/POP3. How do I configure the emails?

Thanks
Moonray

[subnet_rx]

Do you have to do the file edits or not? I see in the instructions about the attachment types, which I don't think I want to do, but does that apply to all file edits or just the first one?

[rustybones]

Ok so me again I'm just trying to get this running. I'm now trying out my ISP's pop3. When I run the cron job it says "done"

But then I check the mailboxes on the test users I've setup there are no emails What am I doing wrong?