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]

Mykkal is all good to go


FYI to all - If your having problems with missing fields, especially after running any kind of integration script. Go to plugins & products -> product manager -> select UNINSTALL and click go. Then reupload the latest xml in the zip. It appears selecting overwrite does not force vbulletin to run all of the previous version queries.

[kevinh]

Hi Chris,

Ive had EI installed on a small forum for quite a while and found it made a significant difference in participation rates, particularly as most of the users were accustomed to an old style mail list.

The only problem is I have a couple of users who regularly edit the reply email and/or try to use quote tags but stuff it up, the result being very messy emails going out to the subscribers and me having to tidy up the posts on the web site.

I would like to have the posts from these users moderated. I have created another usergroup which requires posts to be moderated but when someone in the group posts using EI the post still goes out to the subscribers and still gets published in the forum.

It seems to bypass the moderation requirement. Any ideas why?

[Cyricx]

At the time of writing this I hadn't figured out how to require the moderation. It's going to take alot of rework as right now the cron file checks the emails, sends the post and sends the emails out.

I'll have to separate those steps, but it's in the plans and in the works.

One of the parts of the next version will be hopefully getting it to work with moderation.

Also, it'll be using the php pear package for mail mime decode so that should help clean things up as well.

[kevinh]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

At the time of writing this I hadn't figured out how to require the moderation. It's going to take alot of rework ....

Thanks for responding so quickly. Looking forward to seeing the new version in due course.

Kevin

[toivo]

Here is a rough quick-fix of patches to EI Mod to support moderated forums, cloned from the existing code of EI Mod. The patch modifies emailintegration.php and two of its plugins, adds two custom hooks to moderate.php and installs a product with four plugins.

In limited testing under 3.6.8 this patch allowed moderation from the Admin Control Panel, Moderator Control Panel and also inline moderation

Toivo

[lbernstein]

I'm running EI ver 2.6.1 on 3.8.2. EI is the only mod on the system and was installed months ago. In the last few days I've had 3 posts that will duplicate themselves when posted to the forum (and emailed out). The only change to the system is an occasional error 2006 due to some SQL issues on my host's side. No other changes to the board have occurred for months.

I know there was a problem with duplicate emails in the past that I thought was cleared up in the most recent release.

Any ideas why?

[angeljs]

Hi, this mod seems perfect for my site, but when trying to set it up I receive the following error:

Gateway Time-out

The gateway did not receive a timely response from the upstream server or application.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

I'm presuming it's more to do with my server than your mod?

[jdj]

Hi there. Another newbie here.

You're all ahead of me here. So far I've installed CyricX original version and I'm excited by the idea. What happens to me though is that we put a test post onto the forum, we get the notification and test reply, the cron picks up the reply and sends back to the forum. Then the same reply goes back and forth in a loop. Now I'm guessing it must be something I've stuffed up in installing due to my ignorance and inexperience but if anyone has any clues that would be helpful.

[toivo]

The EI reads each message from the mailbox and then deletes it, therefore messages are not posted more than once. However, if you turn the debug switch on in the beginning of emailintegration.php, messages are not deleted.

Did you create a new mailbox for your forum? It is essential to have a separate mailbox for each forum.

[jdj]

Yes I set up a separate dedicated domain and mailbox specifically for the emails to and from the forum. Emails go to the mailbox, cron picks them up and posts back to forum, then it just keeps going around in a loop. I'm not using 3.6 though, I'm using 3.8.2 at present. Don't know whether that makes a difference. Guessing it's a mistake I've made somewhere.

I'll go back and check the debug thing. Thanks for the idea.