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

[Tralala]

Originally Posted by tekguru

Suggestion - another useful features would be for an Admin to be able to see via the CPL who was subscribed to each forum and also have the abilitry (probably from teh same page) to add in users either by usergroup or via individual username.

Yes... or an option to have subscriptions turned on by default for all members!

[Piggo]

Tralala, it seems to start to come together.

Using PuTTy and installing PHP5 and the custom one...
will update if successful....

[quiklink]

You are going to have to rebuild Apache as well.

[Piggo]

It works!

Managed to get it working on a DREAMHOST server.
It took almost all day (I am new to all this, hence the time) but it works.

Testing it now...

[Tralala]

Cool, Piggo, looking forward to hearing your notes. Much appreciated!

[Piggo]

As mentioned, installing this GREAT email integration plugin isn't difficult, as long as IMAP is enabled on your server.
It isn't with DREAMHOST.
All the following is based on this, and using a WINDOWS XP machine.

To enable IMAP on a DREAMHOST server, you need to custom compile a PHP5 file.

In order to do that, you need to be able to setup SSH on your WINDOWS computer.

This isn't really a step-by-step, but just some points that need to be done.

1) Select a USER on the DREAMHOST panel that has access to your DOMAIN hosted by DREAMHOST. Change to USER ACCOUNT TYPE "Shell account - allows FTP plus ssh/telnet access."

2) Go here and do what that describes in order to get PuTTy working:
http://www.phileplanet.com/archives/...on-windows-xp/
(more reading here: http://www.wiki.dreamhost.com/SSH , but above link should be all that is necessary)
NOTE: I needed to change the PUTTY setting to CATEGORY/TERMINAL: Local echo and local line editing to FORCE ON, and used the PuTTY comand promt by going START/ RUN / and type putty

3) You will need 3 files/codes.
The first two can be found here:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/PHP_5_install_script
a) called php5-install-prep.sh ; b) called php5-install.sh
The third comes later....
The easiest way is to COPY those codes, and save them as a TEXT FILE IN NOTEPAD. The simpleton I am, I used file names 1.txt for php5-install-prep.sh, and 2.txt for php5-install.sh
Before saving those files, change the DOMAIN NAME to your DOMAIN in BOTH FILES, in this line which is about line #22 or so:
export DOMAIN="your-domain-here.com"

4) Then follow the instructions here:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Custom_compile_PHP_5
Pertinent will be this, although you will need to do it TWICE, using the 1.txt file and then the 2.txt file:

Install/Compile PHP 5

Open 1.txt and SELECT ALL and COPY.
Log in to your account using SSH with the PuTTY program mentioned above.
Create a new file in your SSH by entering the command:

vim 1

Hit i for insert mode, then right-click to paste your clipboard (the install script) contents, then hit Esc, type :wq (that's 'colon', 'w', 'q'), and press Enter to save and exit.
Make the file executable by entering the command:

chmod +x 1

Run the script by entering the command:

./1

Now the initial script will install; it will take a few minutes!

Now repeat for the second file:

Open 2.txt and SELECT ALL and COPY.
You are probably still logged in right now...
Create a new file in your SSH by entering the command:

vim 2

Hit i for insert mode, then right-click to paste your clipboard (the install script) contents, then hit Esc, type :wq (that's 'colon', 'w', 'q'), and press Enter to save and exit.
Make the file executable by entering the command:

chmod +x 2

Run the script by entering the command:

./2

Now the final script will install; it will take a few minutes!

After it has finished you will need to edit your htaccess file appropriately. Add the following:
Copy the following and paste into NOTEPAD, and saving it as ".htaccess":

AddHandler phpFive .php
Action phpFive /cgi-bin/php.cgi:

And FTP that file ".htaccess" to your DOMAIN.

Notes:
1) For the SSH session you need to be above your DOMAIN. I.e. you should see such folders as Maildir, logs, yourdomain.com, etc. The .htaccess file however, goes INTO yourdomain.com folder.
2) the FTP program I normally use isn't really good in showing such files as .htaccess, so i downloaded WinSCP free from:
http://winscp.net/eng/index.php


I also did this at the end of this page:
http://www.davidfugate.com/roll-your...eamhost-drupal
cp /etc/php5/cgi/php.ini /home/yourusername/
although I am not sure if that was necessary.

Hope some of this is helpful....

[Andreas]

Phrases instead of hardcoded text would be nice

[Tralala]

Originally Posted by Piggo

As mentioned, installing this GREAT email integration plugin isn't difficult, as long as IMAP is enabled on your server.

Thanks so much for this, Piggo... you rock!

[tekguru]

Any developments with the coding this weekend? Just wondering as on the forum here we are suffering from:

• Additional = characters appearing
• ' characters appearing in the wrong place
• Some online posts appearing without bodies via email
• Signatures not appearing in emails

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by cmwg

Am i correct when saying that you need one mailbox per forum section ?
Would be nice to have it sort that out within the extension.
Something in the header for example
[Forum ID] [Thread ID] Title

or am i missing something and this is already implemented?

That way only one email address would be needed.

The original version required that. I found it to be very unuser friendly. Those that love mailing lists hate any inconveiance and having to put a specific prefix in the subject line like [f-5] for forumid 5, was shot down unanimously and would result in none of the mailing list people moving over of the ones I polled

If someone wants to make a mod based off of this one that does that, they are welcome to

Eventually I might code a version like that, but it would be FAR down the line

Originally Posted by tekguru

Looking at some of my font / colour issues on the email replies I'm posting into the forum when one looks at the message BBCodes on can see in:

[COLOR=#1F497D']Yeah I know Steph ? this is one of the issues the =authorhas to fix.[/color]

The plan is to rip out any color or font html that has # ' or " in it, before it converts to bbcode which should keep any extra [/font] from being left over. Gotta test this out over the next day or two I'll get with you to get some scripts to test out

Originally Posted by tekguru

Suggestion - another useful features would be for an Admin to be able to see via the CPL who was subscribed to each forum and also have the abilitry (probably from teh same page) to add in users either by usergroup or via individual username.

Great idea!! Adding to future plans

Originally Posted by Andreas

Phrases instead of hardcoded text would be nice

Absolutely, I hope to get this into 2.0, it'll depend on how quickly the debugging goes But yes, phrasing is absolutely planned!

Originally Posted by tekguru

Any developments with the coding this weekend? Just wondering as on the forum here we are suffering from:

• Additional = characters appearing
• ' characters appearing in the wrong place
• Some online posts appearing without bodies via email
• Signatures not appearing in emails

Sorry, this weekend was VERY hectic! I'm a pretty busy bee on the weekends hehe.

Digging into the list of bugs today and tomorrow to see what all I can get resolved as quickly as possible.