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

[BigJohnny]

does anyone have this fully working on 3.8?

I installed the 2.6.1 version a while ago, but I cannot for the life of me figure out why it won't pull emails from the inbox and post them back to the board.....that's the ONLY problem I'm having.

[jdj]

Originally Posted by skippybosco

Perhaps we can pool resources and pay to get the issues resolved by the developer to ensure support for vB4+

I made a contribution to the developer earlier this year. Spring I think, sometime ago anyway. He was then busy updating his other mods. I'm still interested in this but if you make a contribution how do you know that anyone will actually produce something or when? This isn't meant as critical...the replies I got from the developer were both polite and friendly. I just made a contribution to indicate that I was interested.

I did wonder whether I should try something else. Somebody said to me recently that php bb and Wordpress both support email contributions. I don't know whether that's true or not but I remain interested in allowing users to contribute to my board via email. I did wonder whether there was anyway to deploy vB4 alongside wordpress or phpbb as a kind of dummy system alongsided vB4 allowing users who wanted to contribute from remote to contribute to the same database.

[skippybosco]

Originally Posted by jdj

I made a contribution to the developer earlier this year. Spring I think, sometime ago anyway. He was then busy updating his other mods. I'm still interested in this but if you make a contribution how do you know that anyone will actually produce something or when? This isn't meant as critical...the replies I got from the developer were both polite and friendly. I just made a contribution to indicate that I was interested.

I did wonder whether I should try something else. Somebody said to me recently that php bb and Wordpress both support email contributions. I don't know whether that's true or not but I remain interested in allowing users to contribute to my board via email. I did wonder whether there was anyway to deploy vB4 alongside wordpress or phpbb as a kind of dummy system alongsided vB4 allowing users who wanted to contribute from remote to contribute to the same database.

Worse case I'll see if the developer is ok with a split of his Mod to a 4.0 compatible by another developer. That might be a quicker way to go.

[amphicar770]

Originally Posted by skippybosco

Perhaps we can pool resources and pay to get the issues resolved by the developer to ensure support for vB4+

Over the past year or so I send at least two donations in hopes that it would inspire the developer to release a 4.0 version.

At this point it does seem like he has abandoned the effort. Perhaps he will release the code to the public domain and someone else will pick it up.

Like others, this is keeping me from upgrading to 4.0. Unfortunately, the VB team keeps telling us that we do not need this feature!

[washingtonboise]

Originally Posted by skippybosco

Perhaps we can pool resources and pay to get the issues resolved by the developer to ensure support for vB4+

Agreed, in fact I am seeing a need for some kind of resource pooling for other plugins as well.
If vbulletin.org could implement widgets such as 'pledgie', that could give authors the ability to put a price on development, e.g. "I will develop this for version 4.x as soon as $500 is raised, so far $320 has been raised (updated automatically). Click here to make a donation."

Money talks and it works. Fundage is a primary reason we don't see more free but critical and highly valued stuff getting maintained, or why it gets updated very slowly. Communism has great ideals, but poor work ethic. Capitalism is the path to progress.

At the very least, authors could even link to their website and host their own donation widgets (hint).

[frankR]

I'd like this mod for 4.x as well.

I'm converting from an email group to a forum and many users aren't happy. This email option would help.

[kevinh]

I used Email Integration successfully on a 3.x site when migrating people from an old fashoined mail list. It served it's purpose well, but a year or so down the track we have now turned it off because it does have it's drawbacks. These include server load and the inability to moderate posts by email. Also, having a new post automatically go out to all subscribers almost immediately after the post can be a real problem if the post is innappropriate or spam. There's also a bit of an admin overhead because people don't understand how it works and are incapable of following instructions

I don't use vB 4, I'm still on 3.6, but I have just found another solution. I installed this https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...ighlight=sorky which adds an RSS feed to each forum and sub forum, (this may already exist in vB 4.x)

My site has a primary level forum (which doesn't actually act as a forum), then about 8 sub forums. So I republish the RSS feed for the primary/parent forum as an email "newsletter" through feedblitz.com and give our forum members the link to the Feedblitz sign up page for the email newsletter. You can tell Feedblitz to check for new posts in the RSS feed daily, 8 hourly, 4 hourly or "express" which is the most frequent. Every time there is a new post in one or more of the sub forums the subscribers get an email.

With the users' permission you can import them as subscribers into your Feedblitz account.

There is unfortunately a cost for using Feedblitz depending upon the number of susbcribers. A free alternative (the on free one I know if) is Feedburner.com (owned by Google) however that only provides a daily email to subscribers.

I hope this helps.

[jdj]

Q. "....So I republish the RSS feed for the primary/parent forum as an email "newsletter" through feedblitz.com and give our forum members the link to the Feedblitz sign up page for the email newsletter."

Not sure this would work for me because it's being able to reply by email that my users are asking for. I suspect it would cause issues but I wouldn't want it on all forums....

[kevinh]

Originally Posted by jdj

Not sure this would work for me because it's being able to reply by email that my users are asking for. I suspect it would cause issues but I wouldn't want it on all forums....

Ok, so the RSS solution wouldn't help you, although if users are interested enough they will come to your forums to contribute.

You can enable EI for specific forums, but bear in mind there are other issues. One is that many people who are accustomed to a mail list will never come to the forums site, they only communicate with the site by email. Also EI does not work well when people try to post by email from a smart phone (i.e iPhone or Blackberry).

For some reason with iPhone mail EI cannot determine where the new post ends, so you will find that people will post their new message followed by the message they received by email. There are also character and formatting issues. Here's an example; http://www.bristolcars.info/forums/b....html#post2444

I was forever "tidying" posts up, otherwise the problem just snowballs when more people post by email.

Also, I found that the ability to post by email encourages people to make stupid posts, probably because it's just so easy to do.

People sometimes accidentally create a new thread by email when replying to an existing thread (because they change the subject line so EI doesn't know to append the post to an existing thread).

So EI has it's pros and cons. It may be a moot point anyway unless you can find someone to develop it for vB 4.x

[misticjeff]

Hi Guys,

I read through about 20 pages of this thread but cannot find an answer and don't have the patience to go through the other 50 pages.

My issues:

Got the mod working last night, tested it and it worked.

Then another admin posted a reply via email and for the past 6 or so hours, that post continues to repeat itself over and over, emailing itself.

Second issue is that i've tried starting a thread by emailing it and it does not seem to be working.

Any suggestions??

Thanks