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

[JohnNM]

Cyricx,

Now working on the installation. In step 4 of the installation, it says, "Import the product file "product-emailreplyint.xml" in this zip." "Be sure to select "Overwrite".

This sounds like something I should do through Admincp, but I am not sure. Can you please clarify?

Thanks
John

[Cyricx]

My apologies for not being more clear

Yes go to your admincp -> Plugins & Products -> Manage Products

Scroll down and click on "Add/Import Product".

Click the browse button and select the xml file. Click the radio button for "Allow Overwrite" and click "Import"

[JohnNM]

Got it. Thanks for the quick reply. Now on to step 5!

[JohnNM]

Installation done - fingers crossed, testing begins.

[JohnNM]

Up and running - initial tests look very good! Thanks again Cyricx. I think this is going to do the trick.

Question - how difficult would it be to disable allowing replies to emails to be directly posted to the forum? I would like people to be able to monitor the forum via email, but I want them to come to the site to post a reply. A switch which turned this off would be handy in this case.

Thanks
John

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by JohnNM

Up and running - initial tests look very good! Thanks again Cyricx. I think this is going to do the trick.

Question - how difficult would it be to disable allowing replies to emails to be directly posted to the forum? I would like people to be able to monitor the forum via email, but I want them to come to the site to post a reply. A switch which turned this off would be handy in this case.

Thanks
John

Are you wanting to do this globally? or only from certain forums?

[RWerksman]

Chris,

Can the stuff between the [ and ] be placed at the end of the notification topic or does it have to be at the beginning?

Additionally, this addon absolutely ROCKS! It might be one of the best addons every for vBulletin.

[Cyricx]

It needs to be at the beginning for the current code for it to correctly catch the subject of the email.

Alot of this code that revolves around retrieving the emails utilizes regex code like preg_match and preg_replace. So fiddling around with the phrases, can completely break the mod

If you modify any of it, I suggest testing it alot.

I'm just waiting on one more response and pending that, I'll likely be zipping out a 2.5 which has just a few small tweaks... that have profound effects

Alex's suggestion above actually springboarded me into a solution that gets this mod to use vbmail! which solves smtp authentication!!

I have it out with one other tester right now that was having similar probs. If everything comes back great with them, I'll release 2.5

After that.. comes the port to 3.7

[popmyzit]

Awesome,
waiting patiently for 3.7 version

Thanks a lot Chris!

[JohnNM]

Cyricx,
Let's keep things simple - being able to make email notifications outgoing-only on a global basis would be fine with me. (Of course, I am sure some time someone would be looking for it to work on a per-forum basis.)
John