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]

Correct. It users the sender's email to get the userinfo

Then compares their usergroups to the array of usergroups that are allowed to post via email to that forum.

[funkmeister]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

Correct. It users the sender's email to get the userinfo

What happens if there's a mismatch? Someone emails from their work email address but forum has there home email defined in their profile? Does it choke this thing or is it posted as Guest or somesuch alternative?

Also, anyone using this successfully on 3.6.5?

Thanks, great job.

[Cyricx]

It sends them an error message.

You can't have it post as guest... otherwise if a spam bot gets ahold of the email address your looking at a helluva lot of posts

Those who are familiar with mailing lists will know that you have to set one specific email address as the one your emailing from. So this will not be an alteration to what they are used to

Also, note that the person's email address is hidden in the emails that are sent out. Unlike yahoo where everyone on the list sees your email address So your users maintain the complete email address security that vbulletin offers even using this modification

[quiklink]

Got this error while trying to create a new forum and setting the Email Integration options. From looking at the database it looks like the ei_active column isn't being created.

Invalid SQL:
INSERT INTO coti_forum
	(title_clean, title, description_clean, description, link, displayorder, parentid, daysprune, defaultsortfield, defaultsortorder, showprivate, newpostemail, newthreademail, options, styleid, password, ei_active, ei_replyaddress, ei_hostname, ei_username, ei_password, ei_connectiontype, ei_usergroups, gfpoforumoptions)
VALUES
	('Mailing List', 'Mailing List', 'Test forum for mailing list integration', 'Test forum for mailing list integration', '', 1, -1, -1, 'lastpost', 'desc', 1, '', '', 97990, 0, '', '1', 'maillist@*****.com', 'mail.*****.com', 'maillist@*****.com', '012345', '0', '6', 0);

MySQL Error  : Unknown column 'ei_active' in 'field list'

[Cyricx]

Please download 1.1 and upload the new product.xml file.

[quiklink]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

Please download 1.1 and upload the new product.xml file.

Hehe ok, I had fixed it here by adding the field to the database manually.

[Cyricx]

Yeah, I had left it off the product file

I'm using the version fields in the product xml to keep things smooth

But I'm also using the hide error so you won't get a burp when you do a future version even if you added it manually

[quiklink]

So this will send out copies of post to the specified forums to everyone in the usergroups allowed to use the mod? Or can member choose to not receive the emails?

[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.

[quiklink]

Excellent! Testing it out right now. If all goes well I'll open it up to a larger group on our forums to test further.