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]

I don't think you need any additional software at all. If I recall right it's a simple edit to the php.ini file.

It certainly isn't software that costs you anything. I'm not the server guru though, so perhaps someone who is can chime in with how easy it is to grab imap

I stand corrected, you do need to download and compile one item. I put a link in the first post with a link to installing imap. Seems fairly painless though

[quiklink]

I think I found the problem. In my case the password being used begins with a zero, but the zero is being dropped for some reason so it's passing an invalid password. If I hardcode the password in, it works.

Changed my password to one without a starting zero and it works, well at least I don't get the cron error anymore. Going to test it all now.

[Cyricx]

How many characters long is the password?

[Cyricx]

NM, can't be that.. hehe I've got the field set for 50 characters allowed...

Hmmm, let me test over here too.

[quiklink]

Ok seems to be working to a degree, but whenever I reply via email I get back an error saying

Message too short: your message does not have the required minimum amount of characters.

[Cyricx]

Hold up Quik, I've got a new version I'm about to roll up with that will handle emails that are only coming in as text only format.

Waiting for cory to test it out

[quiklink]

excellent! happy to test here if you'd like

[Cyricx]

Thank you so much for your patience quik!!! The zip is up!

The new version is up, just need to reupload the emailintegration.php file to upgrade.

The thing I really hate about the text only emails more so then the html is all the > and * line starts. I'm currently trying to find a way to get preg_replace to rip out the > and * characters if they are on a line by themselves..

Whew.. I'm quite the busy bee!

[quiklink]

Heh, I hate HTML email myself, but I'll put up with it for this mod

You are doing a fantastic job! This mod is one I really want to get working properly as we have a lot of folks who prefer using a mail list rather than the forums. This gives us the best of both worlds.

Grabbing the new file for testing now

[Cyricx]

I should really put up a list of my future planned features

One of them will be a usercp controlled switch that users can select to get these via html or plaintext

Kinda waiting to work on too many features til I know the preg_replaces are handling incoming emails right. Those are the key functions, everything else is just toppings