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

[tekguru]

Well done that man Downloading now!

[wally]

seems a very promissing add-on

downloaded and will test it when i wake up (its 3.01am here)

thx

[Piggo]

I unistalled 2.1 EI,
upgreaded to vbulletin 3.7 BETA 5,
installed EI 2.6

and am still getting all kinds of errors:

Email Integration

Fatal error: Call to a member function set_parsing_language() on a non-object in /home/.junkyard/xxxxx/xxxxxx/includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 1093

[Cyricx]

Did you reupload the new files including the new /includes/cron/emailintegration.php file?

The file will have the version 2.6 listed in the beginning of it.

[Piggo]

Yes, I re-uploaded all files.

Funnily enough, it does seem to work for most users (although not for me as admin).

I am immediately getting complaints about too much clutter in the emails.

Does reverting back to "old style" emails (like in version 2.1; I believe I saw a setting somehwre where I can choose which style emails to send/receive) change any functionality?

EDIT I seem to get a lot of double posts....actually more than double...some posts keep showing up over and over again. It's like it's not deleting them off the server...

[tekguru]

I've managed to verify the duplication of incoming posts, over and over..... accidently but done by installing the vMail - Verify Mail before registration Mod.

If this is installed as soon as an import cycle takes place instead of a newly posted message comign in an old one comes in over and over and over.

[tekguru]

If that Mod is disabled and a the email mailbox which is having the duplication problem is deleted and recreated the problem is fixed for a while- but if the other Mod is left enabels it will return.

For the moment I've disabled the other Mod. Here's hoping both authors can work together to come up with a fix!

[Piggo]

Interesting, although at least for me, my repeat posts have nothing to do with vmail, as I don't have that installed.

[Piggo]

Another thing: the email SUBJECT is using the FORUM's name as the beginning; this makes the whole email subject EXTREMELY LONG depending on the forum's name. Is there a way to SHORTEN the email subject?

And is there a way to simplify the emails themself. there's a LOT of extra stuff in there that is causing some confusion with our members (who apparently have the whole thing working, despite me getting a error when I run the cron job manually)

[tekguru]

Originally Posted by Piggo

Interesting, although at least for me, my repeat posts have nothing to do with vmail, as I don't have that installed.

Interesting as the only other Mod added at the same time was AME - Auto Media Embedding (youtube, Amazon, google, myspace, etc...)
and as that does not touch email I thought it unlikely to be the culprit. Do you have that installed by chance?