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

[lionheart53]

I believe this addon will be a great addition. I eventually want the full implementation but for now I'm trying to install and just get the instant notification of new posts via email, but it doesn't seem to work. So I'd like to have it so each forum can get instant notification posts via email but nobody able to reply and post yet. Is this doable? Can I use one email address for all forums for the time being?

I tried setting it up with one email address for all forums as pop3 and just didn't put in any user groups to post via email and so far no posts are being sent out. Any help is appreciated (i'm reading through the pages of posts here to see if this was already answered anywhere).

Thanks

[Big-K]

We have noted in tests that some posts/threads sent via email includes advertorials and email signatures. I have noticed this with Yahoo advertorials in particular. This is a problem. Is there a way to parse out the actual posts without posting advertorials and signatures?

Also would the solution described here make this Mod work with gmail?
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/a...mail-over-imap

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by Antivirus

Hi Cyricx, will this also include text from Private Messages if the member has "Receive email notification when receiving a new private message" turned on?

No, this does not currently handle private messaging.

Originally Posted by tekguru

Chris any feedback as to why 2.2 failed to import mail for us?

We've had to go back to 2.1 to get it to function and as you know that has the SQL bug still in there..... Desperate to get that fixed but until we can find out whay it fails to import we can not go back to 2.2.

Tek, I'll get with you today via email to see if we can determine whats going on

Originally Posted by lionheart53

I believe this addon will be a great addition. I eventually want the full implementation but for now I'm trying to install and just get the instant notification of new posts via email, but it doesn't seem to work. So I'd like to have it so each forum can get instant notification posts via email but nobody able to reply and post yet. Is this doable? Can I use one email address for all forums for the time being?

I tried setting it up with one email address for all forums as pop3 and just didn't put in any user groups to post via email and so far no posts are being sent out. Any help is appreciated (i'm reading through the pages of posts here to see if this was already answered anywhere).

Thanks

To set this up to only send out notifications of new threads and posts, but NOT allow reply emails.

Turn on auto subscription for each of the forums in question. Enter the email address that the emails are coming through (can be admins).

Go to the usergroup manager, enable auto subscription for the usergroup, enter the forum ids they automatically get subscribed to.

Under usergroups use the Auto Subscriptions script to update forum subscriptions.

Now go to languages and phrases and search for "ei_notify" in phrase variable and edit those to your liking, most importantly be sure to remove the you can reply to this.

Lastly... those that DO want to allow replies, DO NOT change the ei_notify! It is very important as currently the script looks for the two -=-=-=-=- lines to remove users sigs and the links to the forum from reposting.

Originally Posted by Big-K

We have noted in tests that some posts/threads sent via email includes advertorials and email signatures. I have noticed this with Yahoo advertorials in particular. This is a problem. Is there a way to parse out the actual posts without posting advertorials and signatures?

Also would the solution described here make this Mod work with gmail?
http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/a...mail-over-imap

I have not yet found a way to remove the yahoo advertisements. On the sigs, it's the sigs that they setup in their emails right? it's not the forum signatures reposting?

The forum signatures should be getting stripped, as far as stripping signatures that they setup for their email to add to the message. No, I do not believe there will be any way to differentiate the message body from that signature as it is added on their side without a universal separator.

In regards to gmail, I'll check into that

[TCattitude]

I am still not understanding how the script would prevent someone with an email address on same domain and a fake header, from posting as someone else.

I would think that a better approach would be to issue a unique hash to each user on the forum and when the email is sent to them this hash must be somewhere in the email so that when users reply the software will authenthicate the user. Or something along the lines.

I will think about the same. That feature IS a must.

Maybe a new setting in usercp to put a new "email posting password", different from the login password (vb's password). Then a user MUST use that password in some part of the email, or in the very beginning of the email's subject in order to be able to post as that user.
So the system internally get that password from the email, validate it, and post the message if its valid. Discard it if its invalid (even log the "email post try", with the content and ip adress to check possible problematics users later).

I will use this mod if some type of security like that is added.
Great job anyways!

[cgmckeever]

So - I am migrating from MailMan to vBulletin, mainly because of this plugin!! Thanks!!

The question is, I have a ton of archived mailing list posts. I was thinking while I am in migration mode, if I added the 'unregistered' group to the email integration and allowed anonymous posting, it would work. I could then forward all the mail as the user to the pop3 and let vB bringing it in.

Then when I am set, I can turn those back off, and lock it down for no-anonymous posting.

Unfortunately, it didnt work that well -- or at all.

Any ideas how I could do this Mailman migration - something simple using the pop retirever in Email Integration would be slick

thanks
Chris

[Tralala]

Originally Posted by Antivirus

Hi Cyricx, will this also include text from Private Messages if the member has "Receive email notification when receiving a new private message" turned on?

That's got nothing to do with this hack, really. And you could easily include text from Private Messages in the email notificiation, simply by adding $plaintext_message to the pmreceived phrase.

[Cyricx]

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up

I'm starting to work on 2.3 here are some of the changes I'll be adding in from others and working on myself

From Ed:
*Configurable newline character for emails (This may be null depending on the vbmail function)
*Subscription manager interface

From Bob:
*Performance and memory saving
*Handle post parentids correctly - affects threaded and hybrided mode.

My focuses will be:
*Get the system to use vbmail.. the spooling is a nessecity for large boards
*Get rid of all that [quote] stuff. It looks kick ass, but it just will never be reliable. This will also significantly clean up and speed up the email cleaning procedure as half of that is determining what kinda email it is to start and end the quotes on. Not to mention some people like to reply within other's posts.
*Get it to accept html attachments, like forwarded messages if the admin sets to accept all attachments.
*Gmail integration, allow a gmail address to be used to retrieve emails from.
*Allow an alternative install that doesn't allow import emails for those that just want the notifications.

There is no time frame on this as the rewriting of the regex's will be quite an undertaking, not to mention trying to get this thing to work using vbmail to send html emails without editting the files will be quite a trick I think.

Anyway. That's what I'm hoping for 2.3

No eta on that release, but keep your fingers crossed!

[Slave]

Just installed 2.2 .. seems to work well .. thanks for the hard work on this

The only problem I can see is if it's a quiet forum (say for a small group of friends) and no one visits the forums, but just uses the emails. Wouldn't this mean no email is processed due to it using the vbcron? Is there a way of getting around this?

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by Slave

Just installed 2.2 .. seems to work well .. thanks for the hard work on this

The only problem I can see is if it's a quiet forum (say for a small group of friends) and no one visits the forums, but just uses the emails. Wouldn't this mean no email is processed due to it using the vbcron? Is there a way of getting around this?

Not that I have yet found. The scheduled tasks are run when the footer template is called from someone visiting if I recall right. This keeps the server from working overtime doing unneeded cleanups and such.

I'm uncertain yet if this is something I want to try to change. On one hand, I'm happy not to be hitting the server every 10 minutes when nothing is going on and maybe if I can get the email processor to pull the time an email was sent to assign that to the post may work well.

On the other hand, I'm unsure of an alternative way to get the cron to run every 10 minutes when noone is visiting from within vbulletin.

If someone has an alternate way to run the cron job from within vbulletin I'd certainly entertain the thought of working it into the mod

[Slave]

Oh, one thing I've noticed is that it is dropping the closing quote tag when I reply via email.

Would that have anything to do with me not using html mail in outlook?