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

[kube]

Is it possible to set "close thread after first posting" for a special forum ?

I have a forum, where users only allow discussions, if they whish...all "normal" threads are closed directly. (checkbox for closing is activated there).

If you start a new thread by mail I think it will not, right ?!

Is it possible to set a kind of if-condition to do that ?

[dosadno]

is it possilbe to install it on vbulletin 3.6.4

[dartho]

I'm having troubles with this with attachments, wav files in particular.

Here's the scenario - a mailer program on another server sends a wav file to me, I receive in Outlook forward to the email address which gets checked by the add-on and the add-on creates a new thread, post with wav file attached. All Good, all works!

However - If I configure the mailer program to send the wav file directly to the email address which gets checked by the addon, the wav attachment looks to remain encoded (encoding snippet:

UklGRoAnAABXQVZFZm10IBQAAAARAAEAQB8AANcPAAAAAQQAAgD5AWZhY3QEAAAAhE0AAGRhdGFM
JwAAUAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

I can open the wav perfectly in outlook. I can open the wav perfectly via web based email account when waiting to be checked by this addon. I've tried multiple providers - including Gmail - all with the same result. The only time it works for wav files is if the email comes from Outlook.

Any ideas?

Thanks!

[ThePiston]

is this mod still supported? i haven't seen Cyricx in a while

[dartho]

I'm hoping so! He posted a week ago in the 3.7 version thread...

[Tralala]

Originally Posted by kube

Is it possible to set "close thread after first posting" for a special forum ?

+1 this would be great... I have a forum for announcements and this email integration makes it super easy to blast those out.

[Aylwin]

Very nice mod! Thanks very much! I tried to use vbMail Reply a few years ago but couldn't get it to work the way I wanted.

I have everything installed and working the way I believe it's supposed to. I also have it working together with another mod that allows users to subscribe to forums and get instant notification of new threads.

Now, I would like to combine the two together. This would mean the user can choose between 2 levels of email integration. The first level is as it is now - full email integration. The user receives email notifications for every single post on the subscribed forum. This is fine except that the user is bombarded with emails if the forum is busy.

So, I would like to propose a 2nd level - partial email integration. The user will receive instant email notifications only for new threads. If they wish to participate in the discussion, they can reply via email. They will then be subscribed to that thread and receive email notifications of all further replies. I believe this 2nd level would be a good option to reduce the number of unwanted emails.

Would this be easy to implement? Is anyone else interested in this? I could try to help with some coding myself but I'd need some help and which files to modify, what additional functions are needed and which hooks could be used.

By the way, Cyricx, subscribeforums.php is great! I've been looking for this mod for ages. You might want to consider releasing it as a separate mod. I know that there are others who would be interested in it. Good work!

[ThePiston]

I think it'd be a great addition to have the 2nd level, but I see a few problems which may or may not be a big deal.
1) thread topics change and although they may not like initial thread topic, it might change and they'll miss out
2) having an "opt-out of this thread" link would mean I'd be clicking on about 100 of those a day for my list which would be a real pain - having to pull up the forum just to confirm that I was opted out of that thread is almost as bad as just deleting them

[tekguru]

Anyone had any issues since upgrading to 3.6.9 of vB? For me it still works but HTML format mails come through as pure HTML, not formatting correctly at all.

We've had to switch over to using text only mails.....

[toivo]

Hi,

We are running 3.6.8 PL 2 and I applied the hotfix 2.6.1 but the email messages were still sent multiple times and remained in the mailbox on the Exchange server. I ran a script to purge the messages (first imap_delete($mailbox, $msg_no); for each message and at the end imap_close($mailbox, CL_EXPUNGE); ).

The next test message was still being sent multiple times, until I changed the Mail Server Connection in the EI settings in the Forum manager from IMAP to POP3. Now the messages are only sent once.

However, in the next test there was one text message (reply to a message sent by EI) in the mailbox when I sent a new HTML message from Outlook. When EI ran the following error occurred:

PHP Fatal error: Call to a member function set_parsing_language() on a non-object in {...test forum folder...} \includes\cron\emailintegration.php on line 1615

I deleted the two messages from the mailbox and sent a new HTML message from Outlook. This time the message was read, deleted from the mailbox, posted to the forum and forwarded OK to the subscribers (me).

However, I was then able to reproduce the PHP Fatal Error by sending a text reply message followed by a new HTML message. Both of these messages were posted to the forum, but both of them also remained in the mailbox because of the error.

I hope this gives some clues where the problem is. I do not think we can expect the average user to want to or be able to switch the default setting for a new message in Outlook from HTML to Plain Text when they need to send a message to the Forum.

Regards,
toivo