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'm inclined to agree, so I've made the changes mentioned.

Thanks DC!

[justchecking]

Hey,

There was a post on my forum using the mod. great work. One question, when someone replies to a thread, how does the code match reply to an existing thread and posts in that thread, rather then creating a new thread.

thanks.
jc

[Warlock40]

Hi, Chris.

I've been watching this hack with great interest.

I think you've done a great job and overall I'm impressed with the support and community interaction.

I'm wondering if this mod covers forums where moderation is required.

Currently if you have the email notification on under forums and moderation, regardless of whether it requires moderation or not as soon as the thread is posted those in the notification section are notified.

Does your hack comply to moderation rules. Meaning if a post is added to a activated room, where moderation is required will users be notified after or before the thread is moderated?

Thanks.

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by justchecking

Hey,

There was a post on my forum using the mod. great work. One question, when someone replies to a thread, how does the code match reply to an existing thread and posts in that thread, rather then creating a new thread.

thanks.
jc

Well, it has two catches in it. There is a header line in the emails that retains the postid number. And then in the subject line of the email is the postid number. The one in the header isn't working as solid as I'd like. It doesn't always correctly grab the parentid for hybrid and threaded modes. Once it's solid I'll remove the postid from the subject lines of the emails. If there is no postid in the header or subject line, it considers the post a newthread and processes it as such This let's people send fresh emails to the mailbox to start new threads

Originally Posted by Warlock40

Hi, Chris.

I've been watching this hack with great interest.

I think you've done a great job and overall I'm impressed with the support and community interaction.

I'm wondering if this mod covers forums where moderation is required.

Currently if you have the email notification on under forums and moderation, regardless of whether it requires moderation or not as soon as the thread is posted those in the notification section are notified.

Does your hack comply to moderation rules. Meaning if a post is added to a activated room, where moderation is required will users be notified after or before the thread is moderated?

Thanks.

It currently does not take into account moderation. This is another reason why I agreed with moving this to a beta mod.

I need to do some reading and studying on the moderation system to determine how the system does that. It might be something simple, or complex, not sure yet

Also, I want to figure out the forumpassword stuff. I want to come up with a system so that forums that have a password can process emails. I'm not yet sure how I'm going to do that without it being very inconvienant for the user.



I really do have full intentions of completeing and finishing out this modification. This is one of the things that I personally feel that vbulletin is truly lacking to be competitive.

The issue is that I have 3 large projects that have to be completed before I can continue on this

[Crys]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

I've got this fixed in the next version. I'm hoping to get a few of the other bugs fixed before releasing it though and that's takin me a bit of time.

Worst case scenario I may just clean up the coede and release what I've got fixed so far.

I'll be travelling outta town this week though and have some huge tasks at work to do in december, so I really can't offer an ETA on the fix I'll see what I can do though.

Heh, that's fine. Knowing that you're working to find the solution already shows progress - and that's saying a lot since a lot of hacks here are not as supported as claimed. Well, I may not be a great coder but I do have an eye for things so let me list out what would be the most ideal version:

- Take all HTML from the e-mail and transfers it to bb-code hence allowing the user to still format text in bold, different fonts, etc..

- Providing us with a way to customize the bottom section of the e-mail (in case we want to leave a more personal message that's more suited to fit our forum)

- Instead of a new e-mail for every post, allow the user to choose whether or not they want an e-mail for every post or a compilation of e-mails once a week or daily. (a new e-mail per post may upset users, especially if the forum is incredibly busy)

-----

That's all I can think of for now. Please understand that I'm not making demands or anything of the sort. All I'm trying to do is provide enough feedback so you can continue to improve this function. Personally, I believe this is one of the most useful hacks to date but it's still in the beginning stages. Of course I'm sure the ideal setting will take time due to real life stuff but, at least, I want you to be aware of what I'm hoping you achieve in the near future.

Thank you so much for getting back to me and I'm glad you also found the minor hiccup I encountered. Good luck and I look forward to seeing your latest release. In the meantime, I'll still use your hack because I do find it quite useful, even though it's not perfect yet.

If you're US based, have a great holiday weekend and enjoy Thanksgiving!

~ Crys ^^

[justchecking]

Chris,

I found the cause of why we get blank screen when "run now" is clicked on scheduled task page for email integration. Everytime the cron is run it causes a crash -

eaccelerator: php crashed on opline 195 of imap_open in emailintegration.php: 111

111 is the line number where imap_open is in my case. So basically we need to fix why
script crashes.

BTW, I opened a ticket for my hosting company and they increased eaccelerator memory to 32M, but the crash is still happening. Earlier I was not checking the logs in cpanel and hence was not sure why we get blank screen.

thanks.
-JC

[Cheertobi]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

I've got this fixed in the next version. I'm hoping to get a few of the other bugs fixed before releasing it though and that's takin me a bit of time.

Could you maybe post how to fix the "html big" manually?!

Regards,

Tobi

[mykkal]

What about embedded images? Has anyone had any success geting embedded images to show?

I can only get images to show as thumbnails if someone emails the image as an attachment.

[Tralala]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

*shrug*

Personally, I think replying within 1 week is doing pretty damn good

I agree... especially with an add-on this complex and unique. I applaud your efforts!

In fact, I am in the middle of switching hosts (as the one I was using wouldn't enable imap in the php.ini file...) solely so I can use this mod.

I am keeping my eyes on it with great enthusiasm and hope to install it very soon.

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by Cheertobi

Could you maybe post how to fix the "html big" manually?!

Regards,

Tobi

I'm actually gonna try to package up my current build. It'll fix the html bug and hopefully a few other issues people are experiencing.

Originally Posted by mykkal

What about embedded images? Has anyone had any success geting embedded images to show?

I can only get images to show as thumbnails if someone emails the image as an attachment.

Hmm.. your wanting to keep them embedded into the post? I haven't even looked at emails with embedded images yet. How does it post emails that have mebedded images? does it come out in a garble? or just rips them out?

Originally Posted by Tralala

I agree... especially with an add-on this complex and unique. I applaud your efforts!

In fact, I am in the middle of switching hosts (as the one I was using wouldn't enable imap in the php.ini file...) solely so I can use this mod.

I am keeping my eyes on it with great enthusiasm and hope to install it very soon.

Thanks!!! I'll continue to pound on this sucker and every step will make it more solid Patience and persistence