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
***

[goddess_dix]

Originally Posted by BadgerDog

I'm running v1.09 without any problems on v3.6.7pl1 of vBulletin....

if it works with the short php tags, don't worry about it. some php configurations will require the longer tags. evidently yours doesn't. it would also work with the longer tags, too, so if you move servers, you might need to change it.

[brvheart]

Originally Posted by goddess_dix

if it works with the short php tags, don't worry about it. some php configurations will require the longer tags. evidently yours doesn't. it would also work with the longer tags, too, so if you move servers, you might need to change it.

exactly, it is just safer to have the long ones, as it works under all configurations as stated above....my config just would not use the short version....

I should have explained that in the post above, sorry about that.

[induslady]

Originally Posted by vbuser99

This is the unsupported updated version of Email reminder for inactive users add-on.
You need to uninstall previous versions (1.09 or 1.11) before installing version 1.20
Both product-remindermail.xml and remindermail.php has been updated.

Version 1.20 is updated and is the working and improved version of 1.11

Updates:
- Renamed emailDate field to reminderDate (user table) because it was too generic.
- Added reminderCount field (user table)
- Added limitperbatch option to limit number of emails sent to inactive users per batch (per cron run).
- Added limitperuser option to limit number of reminder emails sent to a user.
- Updated email message
- Pull only required data via SQL for better performance.
- This version ensures that updates to user table are done correctly, by updating only processed rows. Previous version was bulk updating user table before process started.

I am in the process of adding requested changes, will upload the finished product soon...

Hello vbuser99

Is the version 1.2 ready and available for download. If yes, where can I download it?
Thanks.

[mpoorrajab]

installed ...

it was a good hack ...

[djbaxter]

Originally Posted by popowich

I am getting duplicate from: links. Other e-mails directly from my server are OK. I have two sites with this product and only one of them has this behavior. For the Discuss New York it puts the title of my site @ the name of the mail server (it's tagged to my first domain). It's not like I'm trying to reply, but I'd like to know where it is looking or if it's on my end how to fix this. I'm also wondering if they are going out to inactive members that way or if it's just my report.

Is that what you see in the visible part of the email or is that from "properties"?

Originally Posted by BadgerDog

I'm running v1.09 without any problems on v3.6.7pl1 of vBulletin.... My reminder.php says this on top two lines:

<?
if (!is_object($vbulletin->db))

Should I be changing it to:

<?php
if (!is_object($vbulletin->db))

Originally Posted by goddess_dix

if it works with the short php tags, don't worry about it. some php configurations will require the longer tags. evidently yours doesn't. it would also work with the longer tags, too, so if you move servers, you might need to change it.

Originally Posted by brvheart

exactly, it is just safer to have the long ones, as it works under all configurations as stated above....my config just would not use the short version....

Exactly. It was working fine on my server too with the short form but some server configurations may reject it. Chris hasn't been here in a while but I did email him the link to the post where it was pointed out for future releases. You can add the "php" part yourself safely even if it's working okay without it.

[Fungsten]

I haven't read through all the posts but I have this question. I just got the Inactive users report, email, however it went straight to my junkmail folder. Upon clicking on the sender I noticed that there was and extra user name in the from field that shouldn't be there. The email said it was also sent from one of my members. Is anyone else having this where the email report is maybe getting sent to the junk mail folder or there is another address in the From field in the email?

Thank you.

On Edit: I might be having the same problem as the person in the above post.

[kiFF]

I just installed this a couple days ago, and I just got an email report telling me that all of my inactive users had "invalid" email addresses. I looked up those member's email addresses, and they were fine, so why is it saying this?

[djbaxter]

1. are you using version 1.09 or 1.11?

2. how do you know those email addresses are valid or invalid? how are you checking them?

[kiFF]

1. I'm using 1.11.

2. Well the thing is, the report said that ALL of my inactive users had invalid email addresses, which is unlikely.

I was just checking by looking for spelling errors in the email suffixes. But they should be valid, they have to confirm their email to register.

[ozmazdaclub]

Excellent Mod! Installed.