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

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by AyeCapn

For some reason 2.2 ignores the group memberships... I have created a publicly-joinable group for email notifications, but it still sends to all registered users...

Resolved this issue via email.

He had previous setup for usergroup 2 to have this forum as a subscribed forum. Then used the script to update everyones subscriptions. Then down the road decided to change what users were in control of that forum. Meanwhile all the people in usergroup 2 continued to get the emails as they had already had their subscriptions setup

In the next version I'll try to work up a solution for this. Maybe an admin clear all subscriptions for a forum or something like that.

[dot2slash]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

As for group 1, you mean unregistered users?

Yes .. it works fine ... but the poster is mostly me (maybe its as iam always there )
but a few posts i did see where from another user with no relation to the post/borum or the posters emailadress.

i have a "inbox board" where all groups have post permissions.
i also set all primary groups in mail integration settings to allow.

cronlog -> attachment ..

[dot2slash]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

More then one email to spool causes problems? Hmm, on the live board I have this on, I commonly spool 6-7 emails per forum, with 3 forums enabled for this per pass. It hasn't mixed any messages, subjects or users up in my experience.

it seems like the problem apears if someone uses Gmail ... OR google apps to post only ...
i just maded some testposts (almost 20) .. with diffrent users ...
no problem at all ! one gmail email ... and problems beginning ...
its also mail send trough gmail Webinterface only ...
not mails send trough gmail or gapps .. with another client

[MikeH2911]

Same thing for me. If the emails are received in my outlook account at work, fine no problem, replying from there is fine too.

For some reason gmail doesn't parse the html in the emails and just dumps the html out on the page leaving the user to sort through the mess to find the content. Also, when I reply from my gmail account I receive a reply from the forum telling me I don't have permission to post. This is a complete kicker because the gmail account is the email address I use for my forum admin account and the outlook one is the one I was using for my registered user testing, when I reply from my outlook account at work it gets added to the forum no prob.

I'm guessing that the problem here is gmail but I wouldn't have a clue where to start...

I also noticed that for some reason, although everything is setup identically and should be working fine, this hack is only working in one forum despite being enabled in four of them.

Mike

[asiegel]

First, thanks for a great hack!

Now I have a really silly question that I hope you guys can help me with. I am going to install this hack and got caught up on one piece. In the instructions it says- create a new mail box on your server. I'm not quite sure what to do with this bit. Let me break down my setup for you.

I have vBulletin running on a server outside of my organization. And I have an exchange server in-house that handles all of our email. And our domain is handled by yet another server. I would like to setup email integration for several different forums that we have running off of this one vBulletin install.

If you could please tell me what mailbox (do I need a separate mailboxes for each forum?) I need to setup and how I go about all of this I would really appreciate it.

Sorry for being such a novice!

Thanks,
A

[Tralala]

Yes, seperate mailboxes for each and every sub-forum.

Create a mailbox like you would if you had a new employee who needed a new email address.

[Antivirus]

Hi Cyricx, will this also include text from Private Messages if the member has "Receive email notification when receiving a new private message" turned on?

[dc3dreamer]

In the next version I'll try to work up a solution for this. Maybe an admin clear all subscriptions for a forum or something like that.

My latest code drop to you has this handled in a more elegant way, I think. I added a rather small bit of PHP/SQL code to NotifyEmailForNewPosts that removes all thread subscriptions for the user who is about to receive the forum subscription email, for that forum. As things progress, the thread subscriptions just disappear as needed. No admin or user activity required. It's working perfectly here on my VB system.

[dc3dreamer]

For some reason gmail doesn't parse the html in the emails and just dumps the html out on the page leaving the user to sort through the mess to find the content.

I alerted Cyricx about this. Don't chase rainbows ... what's happening is that if someone has a thread subscription for the current thread as well as a forum subscription for the forum in which the thread is contained, Email Integration first sends the HTML message from the forum subscription, then after the plugin exits, VB goes to send the notification message for the thread subscription. For some reason which I could not spook out, the contents of the VB thread subscription email (and the subject) are from the EMail Integration message. The rest of the mail headers, though are the normal VB thread subscription ones. The result is that the message is typed as text/plain, yet it contains the HTML body from EMail Integration, which the message receiver sees as raw HTML. I know this is hard to follow, but I found this and failed to squash it the "right" way. Instead, as my prev. message explains, I just remove the thread subscriptions, preventing those (redundant) emails from being sent :-)))))

[tekguru]

Chris any feedback as to why 2.2 failed to import mail for us?

We've had to go back to 2.1 to get it to function and as you know that has the SQL bug still in there..... Desperate to get that fixed but until we can find out whay it fails to import we can not go back to 2.2.