Mini Mods - Email reminder for inactive users

Inactive reminder emails. This mod was designed to send out a reminder to inactive members to try and win them back.

***1.2.7 Update***
This update includes built in support for bouncing emails. The script will automatically detect the bounced mail, mark it as bounced so the user is not to be contacted again so as to avoid spam, and then move that user into a seperate usergroup. This plugin is still in it's testing stages, but I have addressed the bugs mentioned previously regarding the emailing side of things.

This is important so keep reading
To install this plugin and take advantage of the bounced email features you are going to need to follow these instructions very carefully. I can not gaurentee that they will work to the letter as this will be based on each persons individual hosting settings.

Step 1: Pre Install
Before you touch this product you need to do the following

• Create an "inactive" usergroup
• Set up a "bounce to" email address
  Pick an email address that you want to use as your bounced email address. Im using "bounce@icora.co.uk". feel free to use whatever you wish.
• Add a email message filter
  This is the hard part. You need to set up a filter that will 'pipe' an email sent to the above email address.
  I am using Cpanel 11 and this is how i have mine set up:
  Rules: 'To' 'Equals' 'bounce@icora.co.uk'
  Actions: 'Pipe to program' with the setting: |/usr/local/bin/php /home/icora/public_html/forum/bounce.php
  This will depend entirely on your settings and structure so you may have to do a little research. It would be very helfull if people who have to use diferent configurations would post them on here.
• Go into vBulletin options, and find the options for 'Emails'. there is a setting asking you if you want to use '-f'. set this to yes.
• While still inn the email options set the 'Bounce Email Address' to your above address.

Step 2: Install
Remove all previous trace of this modification, and upload all the files in the "upload" folder to your base directory of the server.
Go into your product management section and add a new product. upload the XML file with overwrite selected.
Refresh your admin CP to load the new menu items. Just under the "users" group you will find an "Inactive Reminders" group. open that up and click on settings.
Play with these settings and options to suit for the most part. when you come down to the bounce settings you MUST use the same email address as the one you created above.
Set to active and save.

I must re-iterate that this version has not been widely tested, but the simulations i have ran have worked. I look forward to your feedback!

Features:

• Select the period of time before a user is considered inactive.
• Select how many emails to send to each inactive user per inactivity period
• Choose weather inactivity is based on members "Last Post" or their "Last Visit"
• Specify how often followup emails are sent
• Specify alternative emails to send to reduce repetition
• Keep a log of all inactive users contacted

Planned Updates:

• More detail in reports
• ...such as
• Which useres returned
• Effectivness stats
• Email validity

**1.2.1 Update***
Added more detail to the reports section. You can now see the email address, and quickly indicate which emails were invalid. You can link directly to that user to edit as you wish.
I have fixed some errors which have been crashing people's database. Please post any problems if you can.

**1.2.3 Update***
Fixed several problems with escaping strings
Stopped database errors locking up site
***

**1.2.4 Update***
Added a "From Email" so you can specify your own email address to send the reminders from.
Fixed potential bug for people who do not use the mail queue.

Anyone having problems with sending emails out too fast, and multiple emails being sent need to consider changing their email settings in vbulletin options.
People with emails going out too fast - edit Number of Emails to Send Per Batch to a lower amount
People with multiple emails sending - edit Use Mailqueue System to "Yes, with locking"
***

**1.2.5 Update***
Added more stats in the reports page, also added a "Send test email" option so users can test the functionality of the mod
***

[djbaxter]

I believe if you're using version 1.11, it doesn't actually send all those 400 emails out at once. Rather, it adds them to the vBulletin mail queue.

Chris, please correct me if I'm wrong (I'm actually still using 1.09 myself).

[lazydesis]

Update 1.1.1
Edited default templates
Added daily report

coule you please tell me where the report is? thanx ..great hack meanwhile

[YLP1]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

I believe if you're using version 1.11, it doesn't actually send all those 400 emails out at once. Rather, it adds them to the vBulletin mail queue.

Chris, please correct me if I'm wrong (I'm actually still using 1.09 myself).

Gosh I hope so but when I look at the task report, it shows them all going out at the same time.

I couldn't get ver1.09 to work at all which is why I installed the 1.11. Right now I have disabled the cron pending confirmation of whether or not the product uses the vb mail queue.

[BadgerDog]

Originally Posted by YLP1

Gosh I hope so but when I look at the task report, it shows them all going out at the same time.

I couldn't get ver1.09 to work at all which is why I installed the 1.11. Right now I have disabled the cron pending confirmation of whether or not the product uses the vb mail queue.

I don't know about v1.11, but my v1.09 sent out 150 emails over a few days at 10 at a time. I know a lot of folks received them because my logins went up 50% or more. I do know that the test one I sent to a Hotmail account never arrived, but I wonder if that's a filtering thing (blocking?) being done by MSN?

Regards,
Doug

[YLP1]

Using ver1.09 ---- I moved one of my old test member names into a test group--- it hadn't accessed the forums for 8 months.

I never got the email nor did the report identify that the email was ever sent. That's why I tried the 1.11. I am crossing my fingers that 400 emails didn't go out at once. I have a large community forum for a small city and 99% of my members live in this community and use one of three IP providers. That is why I am really worried about the blacklisting ---- Can you imagine one or more of these providers received 200 emails from one source in a span of 5 to 10 minutes? Ouch.... I am crossing my fingers that you are right about it using the vb mail queue. If not, I could be toast with the batch that went out last evening.

[Burley]

Great hack!

Is it possible to change the language of the e-mail automatically according to the default language wich a user has set?

[v12kid]

any updates to the issue with the quantity being sent out? I am afraid to send some as well, dont want to get blacklisted!

Once there is clarification on the issue I will Install it!!

[YLP1]

Originally Posted by v12kid

any updates to the issue with the quantity being sent out? I am afraid to send some as well, dont want to get blacklisted!

Once there is clarification on the issue I will Install it!!

I am waiting for the response as well... I have the ver1.11 installed (couldn't get v1.09 to work) but I disabled the auto cron so that it won't send any emails until I know for sure about the number of emails being sent at one time.

I will say that out of the 400+ that ver 1.11 said it sent --- I haven't received one single bounced email which I think is very unusual. I am wondering if the emails were sent at all even though the log states they were. I don't know how to test this any other way than to use my test account that hasn't been accessed for over 6 months. I never got an email for that account either.

[aam]

Originally Posted by kitsch

I've sent out a huge batch of e-mails and to my surprise the From: field of the e-mail has been set incorrectly. It should have been:

admin@gsm-forum.eu

and instead it got set to:

"GSM Forum Europe" <GSM Forum Europe@p2pgsm.com>

(p2pgsm.com being the name of the server the forum runs on). So the users received the mail from europe@p2pgsm.com... Which isn't really cool.

Originally Posted by C Braithwaite

Not being funny or anything, but try setting your email address to the correct address in your ACP?
The reason that it is putting that email address is because that is what YOU set it to. any emails sent out from vbulletin will use that email address as the return address/contact address.

I've been playing with your mod (v1.11) and it is very useful, but it needs a bit of tweaking. There is a real problem where the from field is not being generated correctly. I initially thought it must be something to do with the email address in vboptions, but it isn't.

I've noticed that the resultant email "from field" can end up as various things, but generally either "bbtiltle <bbtitle>" or bbtitle<servername>. This can lead to the email being rejected by some mail servers (as the sent email does not have a correct email from header, or a domain indicated and no @).

The problem is due to the way vbmail has been used in remindermail.php. The final email from field is not generated by: (line50)

$uheaders .= "From: " . $vbulletin->options['bbtitle'] . " Reminder Service <" . $vbulletin->options['webmasteremail'] . ">" . "\r\n";

Instead it is from the $from: (line 69)

vbmail($toemail, $subject, $message, $notsubscription = false, $from = $vbulletin->options['bbtitle'], $uheaders = '', $username = '');

So all it was generating was a from based on bbtitle. One way to correctly generate a from field containing the board's email is to change $from to use 'webmasteremail': (line 69)

vbmail($toemail, $subject, $message, $notsubscription = false, $from = $vbulletin->options['webmasteremail'], $uheaders = '', $username = '');

A similar problem can be seen in the reminder report produced (line 79), but this time multiple from email headers are created on the report - one from $from and another from $uheaders.

[C Braithwaite]

Originally Posted by djbaxter

I believe if you're using version 1.11, it doesn't actually send all those 400 emails out at once. Rather, it adds them to the vBulletin mail queue.

Chris, please correct me if I'm wrong (I'm actually still using 1.09 myself).

Originally Posted by YLP1

Gosh I hope so but when I look at the task report, it shows them all going out at the same time.

I couldn't get ver1.09 to work at all which is why I installed the 1.11. Right now I have disabled the cron pending confirmation of whether or not the product uses the vb mail queue.

Yes it adds it to the vbulletin mail queue.
sorry, i;ve got a killer headache right now so im not able to reply to everything.