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

[rustybones]

And again: Finally got POP3 running on our companies mail server all is cool there and the cron job runs fine, but still no emails are showing up in my users inboxes, whats going on?!

Also the quick reply no longer works all that well... if i disable this product the quick reply works fine again? weirdness

[txspaderz]

The formatting is a touchy issue. I think he'll have to work with each email program (Outlook 2003 / 2007, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Pocomail, etc) to get the formatting right.

[txspaderz]

Originally Posted by moonray

Thanks for this extremely useful plugin.

On my domain, I use the GMail domain email services and not the server based SMTP/POP3. How do I configure the emails?

Thanks
Moonray

Try using the same settings that you would use if you were putting the information into an Email Program, like Outlook Express. Hostname : mail.gmail.com (or whatever they use) Username: / Password:.

[txspaderz]

Originally Posted by subnet_rx

Do you have to do the file edits or not? I see in the instructions about the attachment types, which I don't think I want to do, but does that apply to all file edits or just the first one?

I would do the file edits. They allow for attachments and ad an additional query. Otherwise I don't think the plugin will work.

(I'm NOT a supporter of this hack. Just Chris has done ALOT of work on my site as a tester, and he's not here, I want to help him out as much as possible)

[txspaderz]

Originally Posted by rustybones

Ok so me again I'm just trying to get this running. I'm now trying out my ISP's pop3. When I run the cron job it says "done"

But then I check the mailboxes on the test users I've setup there are no emails What am I doing wrong?

Are you subscribed to the "Forum" and not to a specific thread? I would double check the email address. Try sending an email from one of those test users to the email address that you setup for a particular forum, and see if it gets sent back or if it goes through.

[rustybones]

Originally Posted by txspaderz

I would do the file edits. They allow for attachments and ad an additional query. Otherwise I don't think the plugin will work.

(I'm NOT a supporter of this hack. Just Chris has done ALOT of work on my site as a tester, and he's not here, I want to help him out as much as possible)

So would you recommend doing all the hacks? or at least just giving it a try?

[rustybones]

Originally Posted by txspaderz

Are you subscribed to the "Forum" and not to a specific thread? I would double check the email address. Try sending an email from one of those test users to the email address that you setup for a particular forum, and see if it gets sent back or if it goes through.

Yeah I've tried numerous configurations. The last conifg I have is reverting back to my ISP's mail server using my login details and email address for my ISP. The test users have accounts inside our company and some with Gmail too... still no dice.

With my ISP mailserver I can use POP3 or IMAP but still no joy with either

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by Corys8646

I just noticed one more thing, when trying to create a new thread or reply to a thread via email, the subject of the email is being entered at the message and the actual email body is being dropped off. (which explains why I was getting the message too short error previously when it wasn't)

Corys, is it possible that you could PM me a login and address to your site? If my preg_replaces don't account for the email type your getting then I'll make some adjustments to get it going

Originally Posted by moonray

Thanks for this extremely useful plugin.

On my domain, I use the GMail domain email services and not the server based SMTP/POP3. How do I configure the emails?

Thanks
Moonray

Use the same settings you would use for outlook express or a similiar program.

Originally Posted by subnet_rx

Do you have to do the file edits or not? I see in the instructions about the attachment types, which I don't think I want to do, but does that apply to all file edits or just the first one?

The file edits are only needed if you want to allow alternate attachment types. They will not add any queries at all, and even the template edit that is done is done in a way that if you don't do the file edits, it will just keep rockin along with no issues

Originally Posted by rustybones

And again: Finally got POP3 running on our companies mail server all is cool there and the cron job runs fine, but still no emails are showing up in my users inboxes, whats going on?!

Also the quick reply no longer works all that well... if i disable this product the quick reply works fine again? weirdness


Yeah I've tried numerous configurations. The last conifg I have is reverting back to my ISP's mail server using my login details and email address for my ISP. The test users have accounts inside our company and some with Gmail too... still no dice.

With my ISP mailserver I can use POP3 or IMAP but still no joy with either

Rusty, the quick reply concerns me, that means it might not be behaving well with another modification. If you would like to PM me an admin login I'll figure out what is going on there.

This is a basic rundown of how the emails work..

When a new thread is created on the forum, plugins check for the email integration settings and then send an email out to everyone that has subscribed to that FORUM for instant email notification.

When a new reply is added to a thread, the plugins check to see what forum that thread is in, and then if that forum has email integration settings, and then sends an email out to everyone that is subscribed to that FORUM for instant email notification.

The cron job does the processing of the emails.

It checks your forums for email integration settings and then connects to each of the mailboxes one at a time. Pulls all the messages out, decodes them, cleans them up, checks for errors etc.

If it is determined that the email is a reply, it uses the datamanager to send the reply and uses the plugins to send out the emails.

If it is a new thread, then it uses the datamanager to post the new thread and uses embedded code in the file to send the email.

So the only time you'll get an email when you run the cronjob is when it is grabbing an email

Additionally, manually running the cron job will sometimes cause the quote boxes to not appear in the mailbox. This is due to the bbcode_quote template not being cached in the admincp



Anyone that has fubared emails or posts please let me know

I know that this is why people have shyed away from making this mod in the past, but I'm determined to get this working for everyone!!

Hey, I can dream right?

[vocoder]

Question about this add-on : how do the posts look in the forum? For example, what would happen if a user replied to the email sent by this add-on with a different email address than the one listed in the forum? I take it this means it would also be possible to spoof email addresses to make it look like replies come from someone else.

(I haven't looked into this add-on much, just have read the intro)

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by vocoder

Question about this add-on : how do the posts look in the forum? For example, what would happen if a user replied to the email sent by this add-on with a different email address than the one listed in the forum? I take it this means it would also be possible to spoof email addresses to make it look like replies come from someone else.

(I haven't looked into this add-on much, just have read the intro)

If the email address doesn't match a user it sends an error message back, and will not create a post.

As far as the replies coming from someone else keep in mind, unlike yahoo mailing lists, with this modification, NOONE sees your email address!!

The emails come tagged as from: Poster's name <reply to email address>

So your email address is even more protected then normal mailing lists allow.