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]

Woohoo! First hurdle down!

The next version will for certain allow both plain text and html emails!

The admin will be able to define which has to be used, or they can let their users decide!

[Cyricx]

I've gotten alot of support for this mod so I feel like I owe it to ya guys to let you know where I'm at. Sides... hopefully it'll moisten your lips!

So after I made that hurdle, it pretty much snowballed to a few more

This is the current status of 2.4 including bugs fixed, new features and still want to accomplish before release.

Bugs Fixed:

• Parent IDs are correctly associated so this mod works completely with threaded and hybrid view thread modes.
• Double encoding of attachments is fixed.
• The "reply via forum" link is fixed. No more missing postids.

New Features (Some address and resolve previous bugs):

• Email subject lines are cleaned up. They will now appear as "[Forum Name] Subject of Thread". The threadid, postid and parentids are all controlled through the email header "Message ID" field.
• Admin option to "dismiss attachments". Admins can now choose to allow attachments, disallow attachments and send an errror, or disallow attachments and permit the post to still be processed.
• Emails have been reformated with a "reply box" this has significantly cleaned up the forum messages and made the emails to the users MUCH cleaner!! I'm most excited about this
• User selectable HTML or Plain Text format for emails!!

MUST DO!:
These are the things I MUST do before I even think about a release..

• Option for Admin to override user optional html/plain text. (DONE!)
• Confirm and address possible bug when this hack is used with "event forums" modification. (tested and found no issues, will have to examine the case that reported an issue)
• Review "table bbcode" mod and resolve issues if they are caused by this modification. (this like glow and shadow doesn't parse) (Not sure I'd classify it as a bug as much as an unsupported feature... at this time the future can change)
• Create a mistake catcher for if the ei_folder field is blank it'll default to INBOX - (DONE!)
• Get the script to work with pulling emails from gmail - (DONE!)
• add an error message in user manager when auto subscribe is turned on, but no forumids are specified (DONE!)
• add an admin option to use new format (reply box) or old format for emails - (DONE!)

Would like to do before release of 2.4:

• vbmail integration (this is the one I want to really really get done, but I'm uncertain of being able to accomplish.. have dumped alot of time on this with little to no luck so far )
• better way of handling thread prefix mod, try to eliminate need to comment out in the file and want to add the prefix to the email subject line
• attachment file edits - want to try to remove these and take them to plugins (DONE!)
• admin options to disallow, or allow crossposting
• Review the interaction with subscribe forum and subscribe thread in an email integrated forum

I'm sure there is something I'm forgetting....


What do I need?

TESTERS!!! I have NO testers right now and I really want to be certain that the regex work for posts

Please PM me if you would like to be a tester!

Thank you all for your support!

Now I'm off to stumble to bed

[AlexanderT]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

vbmail integration (this is the one I want to really really get done, but I'm uncertain of being able to accomplish.. have dumped alot of time on this with little to no luck so far

Chris, would you mind to explain in a few words how you'd like to integrate your plugin with vbmail and how this is causing difficulties? Maybe someone else can come up with some ideas to support you...

[Cyricx]

Basically,

Right now, I build the email headers myself and use the php mail function to send the mail. If you have 200 emails to go out.. this can really really affect your server.

Vbulletin has a function called vbmail, that sends out the emails in batches.

The problem I'm having, is when I use vbmail, I cannot get the headers to build using the $foruminfo and $threadinfo variables.

I dreamed in code last night and had a few more ideas to try LOL!

[Cyricx]

Just a quick update:

I'm going to have an admin option for the format of the emails on if they want to use the "reply section" or the old way.

cgmckeever has some great regex he wrote for quoting that I'm going to add in that will likely handle all the craziness everyone has noticed

This way, everyone will be happy

[Cyricx]

I got this script to work to pull emails from a gmail account to post to a forum. See my second post for what settings to use. Any of the versions of this modification will work provided you use the settings I specify. Remember you MUST enable pop3 connection in your settings section of your gmail account at google.

See the second post for exact how-to

[Cyricx]

Looks like I'm ready to go on the new version.

I'd like to have a few people do a test install first before I launch it out to all.

Please PM me if you'd like to help.

From what I am lookin at right now... this bugger is about to leave the realm of beta in the dust

[columbusgeek]

tempting, but my site with VB is going live in a few days, I can't risk it today.

(I am sure I will risk it after 1 or 2 other people install though )

[Cyricx]

The main thing I'm wanting to test is the email integration file uses a php5 function. But if that function doesn't exist, like if you use php4, it'll create a mock up of the function.

Unfortunately all my servers run the latest and greatest jazz

[AlexanderT]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

Basically,

Right now, I build the email headers myself and use the php mail function to send the mail. If you have 200 emails to go out.. this can really really affect your server.

Vbulletin has a function called vbmail, that sends out the emails in batches.

The problem I'm having, is when I use vbmail, I cannot get the headers to build using the $foruminfo and $threadinfo variables.

I dreamed in code last night and had a few more ideas to try LOL!

Chris, I haven't had a chance to run Email Integration yet (I am waiting for your updated script), but I looked your code and I assume you refer to the following snippet:

PHP Code:

    mail($touser['email'], $subject, $message, $eiheaders);
//    vbmail($touser['email'], $subject, $message); 


Have you tried using this call to vbmail instead:

PHP Code:

vbmail($touser['email'], $subject, $message, false, '', $eiheaders);