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

[tekguru]

Not a problem Chris, ready when you are mate!

[ChurchMedia]

Yeah, I think we are ready to wait until you're ready to release this and able to make sure everything is in line. You're doing us all a favor, after all. I did send you a little incentive anyway -- I encourage others to go ahead and donate some $$ to you for your efforts. I don't think you're the type to just drop the hack, but make it the best you can.

Thanks again!

[Cyricx]

All -

In my usual busy and hectic weekend way of life I'll be out until Sunday evening starting tomorrow morning.. Heading out on vacation with the famn damily to St Louis

Gotta keep them happy or the wife and kids will string me up!

Originally Posted by ChurchMedia

Yeah, I think we are ready to wait until you're ready to release this and able to make sure everything is in line. You're doing us all a favor, after all. I did send you a little incentive anyway -- I encourage others to go ahead and donate some $$ to you for your efforts. I don't think you're the type to just drop the hack, but make it the best you can.

Thanks again!

Thank you VERY much!!!

Originally Posted by rbgrn

Ok I'll explain once more. I pull mail in from a mailing list to my BB as read-only threads. it's 1-way communication. I assemble them into threads like gmail assembles emails into threads. If you want an example, check out http://www.diyelectriccar.com/forums/ and have a look at the "External Information" forum, which has a few forums that use this. You'll see immediately what I'm talking about. I think this will be a common use of your mod as people try to gravitate toward forums but don't want to leave an old mailing list behind.

I will absolutely check this out sunday or monday to get a complete idea of what you are hoping to accomplish with this hack, and then see what I can do to accomodate that as well

Originally Posted by rpainter

Hello. I installed this mod, and it works great, except that attachments are not working. It will add the attachment to the post. When you click the attachment, you just get a page cannot be displayed error. See here:

http://scbbqtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=750

Please let me know what i did wrong (I followed instructions). Thanks.

Unfortunately with my timeline for getting this version released I wasn't able to check out this bug or miss-install yet. I will check it some today and more sunday.

Hopefully it'll be something easy I can figure out for ya in the hour I have before I gotta start getting ready for the trip

[tekguru]

Sounds good Chris updated and installed!

[OS Master]

No. There isn't any other modification about Google Apps. Basically I use it to manage my e-mail. I can create accounts there and manage them. I tried using Google's settings and it doesn't work; I didn't get any e-mails.

[Cyricx]

So basically, your using a (name)@gmail.com as the email address to catch the replies and new threads from?

[glennno]

This looks great! AyeCapn alerted me to this mod. I intend to use it pretty much like Tralala -- no email posting, just email notification of ALL posts.

My Yahoo users who I'm trying to get migrated over to vB are upset that they only get emails for threads they've posted in (forget trying to teach them about subscribing), and that even then they only get a notice of the first new post, not all of them.

So I'm installing now.

Also, I'm very impressed with all the work and updating and feedback you're giving, Cyricx, so I'm supporting with some $ too.

Thanks.

[glennno]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

Yes it can, you'll just need to disable the scheduled task that runs.

Also, the emails are completely phrased. The two you'll need to fiddle with to customize and remove the reply stuff will be "ei_notify_thread_forum" and "ei_notify_post_forum".

Since you are not going to use the email retrieval side of it you will not need imap.

But I must stress to everyone else that will be using email retrieval... be very careful fiddling with those phrases as the cron job looks for

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

and

You can also begin a new thread by sending an email to $foruminfo[ei_replyaddress]!

and cuts everything out between that to remove the signatures and the links from emails and posts. If you mess with either of those or remove them, signatures will get duplicated in posts and emails

But Tralala, since your talking about not using that retrieval, you won't experience any side effects from completely chopping up those phrases to your delight

.
EDITED:

I'm using it the same way as Tralala (i.e., not letting users post via email). I followed all the install directions, then revised the phrases "ei_notify_thread_forum" and "ei_notify_post_forum" and disabled the cron job. I enabled usergroups for "Email Reply Integration Settings" for all forums. I enabled "Enable Email Integration for this forum?" for each forum. But no notifications are going out.

Any ideas on where I should be looking for what I'm missing?

In the forum settings, I tried both filling in and leaving blank the "Email Address user's should reply to" field. I assume I can leave it blank since I don't want them to reply to the emails, but neither try worked.

Thanks for any help anyone can offer!
G

[fxs158]

I am still having problems with the links on the email. If I copy and paste the links they look as follows;

"note that the only intentional space is left after http."

To unsuscribe to this email group;

http ://www.mysite.com/forums/subscription. php?do=addsubscription&f=12

Reply to this topic;

http ://www.mysite.com/forums/showthread.ph p?t=4180

Start new thread via forum
http ://www.mysite.com/forums/newthread.php ?do=newthread&f=12

The only link that works right is;

Reply via Forum

Thanks in advanced for looking into this!!!!!!!

[OS Master]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

So basically, your using a (name)@gmail.com as the email address to catch the replies and new threads from?

No. Let me explain:

I let Google handle e-mails for my domain. I put their MX records there so I can get e-mail addresses like "webmaster[at]usingyouros[dot]com". So can this hack work for something like this?