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]

That's easy.

Enable email modification in the forum manager and fill out the "reply address" as the admin's email address.

Disable the scheduled task for Email Integration in the scheduled task manager.

Then you can go to Languages & Phrases -> Search in Phrases -> searching for ei_notify in the variables and you'll see all the phrases for the emails. Then you can modify those to your liking.

I do NOT suggest anyone change any of these phrases unless they will be disabling incoming mail!!!

The regex in the scheduled task rely on specific layouts of the -=-=-=-= lines in the emails to correctly parse and interpret the incoming emails!

[FCS-Webmaster]

Pardon, odays update is for what?!
I didn`t get it. Sorry to ask.

[Cheertobi]

The new version uses now the "internal" vbmail function!

[Cyricx]

Yep yep

Complete with handling the mail queue and smtp authetication!

[amphicar770]

Cyricx,

Once again, thanks for the greatest mod ever. I do hope everyone is donating some $$ to your effort.

Three quick questions.

1) Under vbulletin - email integration settings it says, "See the "Install File" on how to change the default email type." I do not see this info? How do you set default?

2) Smilies are still showing up in my messages as little red x's. I modified paths, here is one: http://www.amphicar770.com/amphicarf...milies/012.gif What am I doin wrong here?

3) After upgrade is it now using vbmail automatically or do I have to modify something? Stupid question but what would it be using otherwise?

Thanks again.

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by amphicar770

Cyricx,

Once again, thanks for the greatest mod ever. I do hope everyone is donating some $$ to your effort.

Three quick questions.

1) Under vbulletin - email integration settings it says, "See the "Install File" on how to change the default email type." I do not see this info? How do you set default?

Ah bugger, I forgot to include the query in that.

If you want to change the default way that everyone sees the emails while allowing them to choose what they want, you need to run a query.

Be sure to replace (TABLEPREFIX) with your table prefix or remove that if you do not use one.

This query changes the default value for the field for new users that register from this point on to 1 which is for HTML emails.

ALTER TABLE `(TABLEPREFIX)user` CHANGE `ei_format` `ei_format` INT(3) NOT NULL DEFAULT '1';

And this query changes all the current users to using the html format.

UPDATE `(TABLEPREFIX)user` set `ei_format` = '1';

This is assuming your going to leave it so that user's can choose what format they want. From here they can go in and change it to plain text if they want.

If you DO NOT want to let user's choose and want to force html, just use the options in the vbulletin options.

Originally Posted by amphicar770

2) Smilies are still showing up in my messages as little red x's. I modified paths, here is one: http://www.amphicar770.com/amphicarf...milies/012.gif What am I doin wrong here?

This is similiar to what happens with vbadvanced. You'll need to go into your smilies and change the path to them to be the full url to the smilie. For example
http://www.yourdomain.com/forum/imag...ies/smilie.gif

Originally Posted by amphicar770

3) After upgrade is it now using vbmail automatically or do I have to modify something? Stupid question but what would it be using otherwise?

Thanks again.

You need to do nothing. All emails are now sent through vbmail It's automatic



Hope this helps!!

[AlexanderT]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

You need to do nothing. All emails are now sent through vbmail It's automatic

Congrats

[FCS-Webmaster]

Originally Posted by Cheertobi

The new version uses now the "internal" vbmail function!

Thnx Tobi for your helping Hand.
It`s always a pleasure to meet you

[tekguru]

Wehave a problem with the email integration Mod. On enabled forums around 60% of the time if we quick reply we get:



taking place, if we refresh the post is there. If we use regular reply around the same amount of chances we get (..815), again a refresh fixes.



We?ve also seen: ?This post is a duplicate of a post that you have posted in the last five minutes. You will be redirected to that thread.?

Or

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /home/windows/public_html/forums/includes/functions_newpost.php on line 908


So some serious issues for us somewhere...

Can give you Admin access if you need it to track this one down.

Have confirmed if we disable the Mod the issue vanishes completely, turn it back on and it returns.

[JohnNM]

Hi Cyricx,

Everything works very well except I am struggling with being able to have email pulled into the forum. I can see the email sitting in the user's mail box, so I know that it is getting that far. I expect that the issue is the mailbox name. I am running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1. In this system, email is stored in /var/mail/username, not INBOX. Should I enter the full path to the mailbox? Is INBOX some Microsoft server name?

Thanks,
John