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

[mykkal]

don't most out of office replies have that in the subject? It can only be so perfect. Maybe put in an out of office setting for users to check/use when they are out of office. You can only do so much without human intervention.

[dot2slash]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

The email script should be running automatically now... albeit vbulletin's cron system only runs when the site has traffic.. but I have not had any reports yet of the script not running when ther is traffic accessing the footer template.

Are you have issues on your site with this?

all cronjobs running usally as planned (i have some little traffic to ensure this)

the emailed posts with attachments are show the postbit_attachment or postbit_thumb templates
but the graphics are not shown ...

this remains so ... even after days .. nothing changed ...

if i start maintance (admincp) and let the board create the thumbs its apears.

storage is DB driven ... (but i can switch this if needed)

[Piggo]

Probably to early to answer; but what's the likelihood that this email integration will work with 3.7 right out of the box?

(still running this as a trial in 3.6.7....but want to release it forum-wide when upgrading to 3.7....)

[rodneytamblyn]

Is there any way to make Email Integration check an IMAP mail box but not delete messages it finds? I'd prefer to keep a record of all messages received and at present it is deleting the messages whenever the cron job runs.

Enhancement suggestion - it might be nice to have a configuration option to transfer messages from INBOX to another box after they have been processed (perhaps even two boxes, one for accepted another for rejected)

Thanks

~ Rodney

[vrwired]

Originally Posted by lbernstein

I'm kinda new to this, so bear with me.

Was able to get the mod working this morning and the emails are coming through. I am having some problems with out of office and other auto replies. How are others dealing with those beyond adding more terms to the filter?

Still with a database error. Any suggestions on where to start on that problem???


L. Bernstein, MD
Damn it Jim, I'm a doctor not a coder!

I am a coder, but haven't found a way to get this to work yet... cyricx? any insight on how to fix this yet?

[vrwired]

Originally Posted by lbernstein

When runing Auto Subscriptions I get a Database error:
Database error in vBulletin 3.6.8:

Invalid SQL:
SELECT title FROM forum WHERE forumid =;

MySQL Error : You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 1
Error Number : 1064
Date : Monday, December 10th 2007 @ 01:51:01 AM
Script : http://www.ambersight.com/forums/admincp/admin_ei.php
Referrer : https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?p=1398363
IP Address : 76.171.161.117
Username : lbernstein
Classname : vb_database

I'm not quite sure what the error means. Can anyone help?

Cyricx? This is the same problem that i'm having with auto subscriptions... haven't found a way to fix it yet.. any insight from you?

[vrwired]

Originally Posted by vrwired

Cyricx? This is the same problem that i'm having with auto subscriptions... haven't found a way to fix it yet.. any insight from you?

Regarding the problem with "Auto Subscriptions", if you know enough about working 'under the hood', here's a hack to get this working:

The problem when trying to load auto subscriptions is:
Invalid SQL:
SELECT title FROM forum WHERE forumid =;

Here's what I did to 'fix' it so it would at least function...

1) Open up file admin_ei.php in the admincp folder.
Around line 52, it reads: $getforuminfo = $db->query_read("SELECT title FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "forum WHERE forumid = $forumupdateid");
-- just hardcode (i.e. replace) $forumupdateid with the actual # of the forum you want to subscribe all users to (I had 7 different forums, so had to do one at a time )

2) You also need to update the table 'usergroup' in your forum's dB... if you have phpmyadmin you can use this query to pull up the info you need to update:

SELECT usergroupid, title, ei_forumid
FROM usergroup
WHERE ei_auto =1
ORDER BY `usergroupid`

Find the row that has 'registered users' in the title column Now change the value for 'ei_forumid' in that row to be the forum # that you are subscribing all users to (same # as in the first step)....

Now you should be able to subscribe all users by going to admincp and clicking "Auto Subscription" again, but will still need to repeat steps 1 and 2 until you get all forums subscribed...

[Mad Dog]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

No, you won't need a new host

Most hosts will not have any issues at all with enabling IMAP Like I said, I have yet to encounter a host that didn't have it enabled.

All they have to do is uncomment one line and recompile the php. Pretty quick and painless

Talked to GoDaddy today about getting IMAP enabled. Not gonna happen unless I start using a virtual dedicated server solution. Then supposedly, I would be able to configure the server myself so that IMAP is enabled. I really don't understand GoDaddy's rationale behind this policy.

[capsize]

Originally Posted by Mad Dog

Talked to GoDaddy today about getting IMAP enabled. Not gonna happen unless I start using a virtual dedicated server solution. Then supposedly, I would be able to configure the server myself so that IMAP is enabled. I really don't understand GoDaddy's rationale behind this policy.

I switched from GoDaddy to another hosting provider because of this. GoDaddy's problems are worse than just their lack of imap support in php. You cannot connect to their email servers from your shared hosting server at all. They block all network connections to their email servers from their own network. And they refuse to fix this. They claim it's "a limitation of the shared hosting environment" and push you to their VPS products. I had tried to code my own POP3 client to use this mod since their php server does not have IMAP support and then noticed that connections would simply fail. So there's no way for a GoDaddy shared hosting website to do any sort of automatic email processing, php or otherwise. PM me if you want a hosting recommendation. You're gonna have to leave GoDaddy shared hosting or at least use an email server other than GoDaddy's to use this mod.

[Mad Dog]

Well, mod is installed and working beautifully with the exception of being able to post replies or new threads from email. Without a doubt, the ability to receive instant email notification (as well as daily/weekly digest mode) of ALL new posts and threads should be a part of the core vBulletin application.

Given that I convinced a client to transition to vBulletin so that we could use this mod and have Yahoo group forum functionality with an improved and more flexible interface, I am now in search of changing web hosts. If anyone has any recommendations, by all means PM and let me know.