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

[glennno]

Welcome back. Thanks for the heads up. Good luck!

[vocoder]

I am running into a problem. I can reply via email no problem, but when someone else (who is in the same usergroup I am in) does, they get a message saying they don't have the correct permission to reply by email

any ideas what I should be looking for? This person is also a member of the administrators user group (just like me) so I don't understand why it isn't working for him

[MikeH2911]

Just wanted to say, excellent mod, I really appreciate it. got it installed and working fine, only question I have is that the email subject headings are coming up with the thread id number next to the forum title, i.e.

[Test-t-234]Test subjest.


Any idea why? And can this be fixed. Other than this there is absolutely no problem with it it's working perfectly

EDIT: Forgot to ask about a digest option for people who don't want to receive every single email. Is this a possibility? It's the only thing I'd add if I could. Was looking at the cron code but I'm not up to speed on it so wouldn't be any help sadly.

Cheers

Mike

[dot2slash]

the mod works fine ....
but if there are more as one email to spool its getting in serious problem ... topics and body mixed ....
or just not processed without any message back, post or log entrys

another thing ....
public posts (if enabled group1 to post) causes some random user is assigned to the post ...

it would be cool in another version to be able assign a user for public posts ...

[jzewatsky]

I'm running my board on a virtual server through godaddy. I've been told that IMAP is not available on a virtual server. I would love to use this mod, it would greatly enhance my board.

Any ideas?

[AyeCapn]

Originally Posted by MikeH2911

Just wanted to say, excellent mod, I really appreciate it. got it installed and working fine, only question I have is that the email subject headings are coming up with the thread id number next to the forum title, i.e.

[Test-t-234]Test subjest.

This is how the hack knows what thread to post the reply to.

[Cyricx]

Haven't abandoned ya guys, just getting slammed hard at work, end of quarter and all that jazz. Bear with me and I'll get 2.2 bugs fixed and moving towards 3.0

Originally Posted by jzewatsky

I'm running my board on a virtual server through godaddy. I've been told that IMAP is not available on a virtual server. I would love to use this mod, it would greatly enhance my board.

Any ideas?

This must be something specifically with godaddy. One of the sites I used to help build was hosted on a VPS (Virtual Private Server) with westhost and it allowed IMAP to be enabled.

I have not found any reliable way to pull the information for emails without using imap

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by dot2slash

the mod works fine ....
but if there are more as one email to spool its getting in serious problem ... topics and body mixed ....
or just not processed without any message back, post or log entrys

another thing ....
public posts (if enabled group1 to post) causes some random user is assigned to the post ...


it would be cool in another version to be able assign a user for public posts ...

More then one email to spool causes problems? Hmm, on the live board I have this on, I commonly spool 6-7 emails per forum, with 3 forums enabled for this per pass. It hasn't mixed any messages, subjects or users up in my experience.

As for group 1, you mean unregistered users?

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by Marv

I know - this is the 3.6 section. But has anyone tested this baby on 3.5.x ? I am looking for this mod since I left 3.0.0 behind me

Hypothetically, it would work with 3.5, you'd have to edit the product xml and remove the execution orders. But this is not tested with 3.5 to my knowledge.

Originally Posted by Big-K

nice hack. I cant wait to get this working on my site

I got the following error when I ran cron job. What's wrong?

Are you certain your using the latest build? Please download 2.2 and be sure you are overwriting the emailintegration.php file in your /includes/cron/ file.

Originally Posted by rpainter

Installed the new version, and still having issues with attachments. Any ideas?

Please describe your exact issues with attachments, or email me again. I know we briefly discussed it via email.. but things have been nutz lately

Originally Posted by Virtex-II

On version 2.2 the variable $newpost[postid] doesn't seem to be parsed in the right way in the notification system. That's what I get in the email:

http://www.mydomain.com/forums/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=0&p=

Eek, I'll check this out. Are you getting this from
1) Emails for new threads posted from the forum
2) Emails for replies posted from the forum
3) Emails for new threads posted from email
4) Emails for replies posted from email
Thanks!!

Originally Posted by Virtex-II

Thanks a lot ChurchMedia for your help! Your post and your tutorial (I registered to your forum) cleared all my doubts.

I still have some questions...The links reported on the e-mail seem to be uncorrect (I use OE), for example:

http://www.mydomain.com/forums/subscription.ph%20%20p?do=addsubscription&f=2

the red part doesn't make the link work properly.

All the other links are uncorrect (spaces appear in them) but seem to work right.

When someone tries to answer via email, how long does it take to have the new thread on the forum?

When I run the cron job I get this error:

Email Integration 
 
Warning: imap_open() [function.imap-open]: Couldn't open stream {http://webmaildomini.aruba.it/cgi-bin/webmail.cgi:110/pop3/notls}INBOX in /includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 111
 
Warning: imap_headers(): supplied argument is not a valid imap resource in /includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 114
 
Warning: imap_close(): supplied argument is not a valid imap resource in /includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 1213

or

Email Integration 
 
Warning: imap_open() [function.imap-open]: Couldn't open stream {http://webmaildomini.aruba.it/cgi-bin/webmail.cgi:143/novalidate-cert}INBOX in /includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 111
 
Warning: imap_headers(): supplied argument is not a valid imap resource in /includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 114
 
Warning: imap_close(): supplied argument is not a valid imap resource in /includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 1213

Is there anyway to fix them?

Regards!!!

1) Problem with links. What mail browser are you using to view the messages? Outlook, yahoo, gmail, etc?
2) Timeline on emails being posted - Every 10 minutes is the earliest, longer if your board is inactive for awhile. All cron jobs work when the footer template is called.
3) Your using the wrong connection type to try to connect to the mailbox. Try one of the other connection types.

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by MikeH2911

EDIT: Forgot to ask about a digest option for people who don't want to receive every single email. Is this a possibility? It's the only thing I'd add if I could. Was looking at the cron code but I'm not up to speed on it so wouldn't be any help sadly.

Cheers

Mike

You can do this now by going to the subscribe to forum linka nd selecting daily or weekly. But you will not be able to reply to those emails to post a reply to a thread. I think hypothetically the template for those emails could be editted to enable links but honestly I don't know.

Originally Posted by vocoder

I am running into a problem. I can reply via email no problem, but when someone else (who is in the same usergroup I am in) does, they get a message saying they don't have the correct permission to reply by email

any ideas what I should be looking for? This person is also a member of the administrators user group (just like me) so I don't understand why it isn't working for him

Your absolutely certain that they are in the primary or secondary usergroup that is in the field in the forum manager for:
Please enter the usergroup IDs that can post and reply by email.