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

[Corys8646]

if you are looking for any input, my preference would be to have it be all text only emails...

HTML just seems to really add a lot of confusion, and I also think that users that are coming from older email discussion groups are used to text only. It really seems to simplify things.

anyway my $.02

great job!

[Cyricx]

The problem with text only all the time is

A) smilies get lost, the plaintext parser rips them out entirely, not even the replace code remains.

B) links to your forums become inactive, thereby losing the ability to encourage your users to come to your forum, rather then just sit back and read emails

The second one is the big kicker for me.

But hey.. I'm all about user optional

[quiklink]

Woot, that looks like it got it!

[quiklink]

One suggest if there is any way to do it. Don't have it send replies back to the person who sent the reply. No biggie though.

Again let me say thanks for a great mod with a lot of potential!

[Corys8646]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

B) links to your forums become inactive, thereby losing the ability to encourage your users to come to your forum, rather then just sit back and read emails

I see your point, In my experience with text only emails - the email client will still usually create links as long as you have the www.

at least on thunderbird it does.

all the links that vbulletin sends out (thread notifications etc etc) are all clickable links for me, as text only..

[Cyricx]

Ah right on. Maybe it won't be as bad as I fear.

It shouldn't be hard at all to code. It will make it into one of the early versions for sure Just gotta get through these various email programs first

And those damn lines with just > on them that are driving me insane LOL!

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by quiklink

One suggest if there is any way to do it. Don't have it send replies back to the person who sent the reply. No biggie though.

Yeah, I've debated back and forth on that one. The mailing lists send it to yourself. Which can be nice if you like start a thread and then go.. O crap, I forgot about this, you could grab your email about the thread posting and reply to that and yoru good to go.

Without getting emails back to yourself (like mailing lists do), you'd either A) have to wait for someone to reply or B) have to jump over to the forums

It will likely end up becoming another end user option though with the default being receive emails about your own posts.

Besides it also makes sure you know it actually posted

What do others think?

[txspaderz]

I like the idea of that being an end user option, for the reply to who replied.

[Tralala]

Sadly, my ISP won't enable the imap_open() requirement, so I'm going to have to sit out of this one for a bit. I see this is a pretty common issue though; here's a page for folks who need to deal with it.

http://drupal.org/node/121634

I guess when I get some time I'll attempt to custom compile PHP... or find a kind soul willing to help.

[tekguru]

Well back from holiday and this just had to be installed before I hit the shees last night

Looking good and working well so far. Suggestions from me include those already on the to do list, but I'd like to add:

- Option to remove the signature when exporting the email.
- Option to remove some of the links in the email footer - for example we dp not use the Calendar at all on site and have it turned off.

Anyway the site staff should hopefully start testing it later on today. More thoughts from me later when I start to try getting clever with the system