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

[toivo]

The location of the PHP error file is set in the php.ini file, for example:

error_log = /var/log/httpd/php_error.log

If you do not have access to the php.ini file in your hosting setup, you may be able to change the location of the PHP error log so that you can see the error messages. There are a couple of ways to to do that, for details see http://php.net/configuration.changes

If you are allowed to use .htaccess files in the document root directory, you can use the directive php_flag to set a local value to the error_log directive.

Otherwise, if you are handy with PHP, you may be able to set up a local value for the session using the ini_set function.

It is important to find out if a PHP error has happened and where it occurred before the problem can be addressed.

[itconsultingnv]

Performed your mod (toivo) to the cron file and still had messages left on the server. Checked the debug variable and it is set to 0. Weird. Not sure why my installation is leaving emails on the server. Any ideas beyond the ones you provided? Had issues in the past while testing. Had the older version running but IMAP was not enabled. Uninstalled the mod and reinstalled the newest mod. Could there be some throwback code left in the installation. Ugh. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks again for your input!

[itconsultingnv]

btw, since I made that mod you suggested...

The line 1615 is in the file /includes/cron/emailintegration.php:

$plaintext_parser->set_parsing_language($touser['languageid']);

Workaround:

$plaintext_parser->set_parsing_language( 1 );

I am no longer getting the error I had when manually running the cron. Will test again today and see if it is working now. Odd, suddenly I have the Admin CP -> Email Integration in the sidebar when earlier I didn't. Cache? hmmm.

Again everything is working great except emails are being left on the server and continually reposted to the site and emailed out to users. Frustrating!

[itconsultingnv]

Okay. Soooo weird. Think cyricx is listening, watching... and still had my log-in information, which would be just fine with me. LOL. Appears to be working properly now. Leaving no duplicates, no errors. Wild. Had a bunch, and I mean a bunch of repeats from two posts throughout the night. Deleted those manually through webmail and just retested... wala. No more emails being left on the server. Brilliant! Now I just hope nothing gets broken when I upgrade to 3.7 when it goes stable. Any issues I should be aware (afraid of)? Any input would, as usual, be greatly appreciated. Thanks again toivo and cyricx for the great support! Much appreciated.

[itconsultingnv]

Okay, so everything was working, emails going out and being deleted from the server as they should. Then I started getting notifications of some double posts and posts not showing up from email replies. Went to run the scheduled task and I am again getting the following error when running the email integration cron (the error that was showing up for a time the last few days which when it start=ed working was no longer erroring).

Email Integration

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /home3/naeadm/public_html/forum/includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 1093

SO it appears that if my cron is erroring out with the above error the email funcitonality is not consistent. But when I do not receive this error everything work fine. The only oddity is why this errored out for awhile and then started erroring again.

I have one email response that appears to be going out multiple times now. Like it is stuck in the POP account and not being deleted. Logged into the webmail interface and go figure, there were emails in there. Manually deleted them and then reran the cron, walaa! it runs. Is there some type of formatting issue within an email that could cause this? Emailed another response to the post and now it is functional again. Almost as if one of the email posts was causing the cron to fail. Odd! Any advise? Thanks in advance, again!

Any ideas? Really quite frustrating now. What variables could cause this effect? Thanks in advance!

[itconsultingnv]

Modified the code at line 1093 to the same mod as toivo and things appear to be working... for now! Testing again, after clearing the pop account. Hope this works!

[ttseppal]

Hi, toivo

In my case, the problem lies with the variable plaintext_parser not being correctly set. So I commented the line 1266 at cron/emailintegration.php like this:

//unset($plaintext_parser, $pagetext_cache);

This way, I do not receive the error on line 1093 (call to member function on a non-object), and emails get deleted from the mailbox, too. I just wonder what side effects this might cause.

Originally Posted by toivo

Hi,

Here is a workaround to the problem which stops messages from being deleted:



Force the language code, rather than retrieve it from $touser['languageid']:

Line 1615:



I sent three messages to the mailbox, hit the forum a few times and received all three messages. And they had been deleted from the mailbox, too.

Regards,
toivo

[itconsultingnv]

Interesting... but just found that of the 4 users I have beta testing the email integration with (in a private forum) if one of the users, lets call it user A (who is using outlook and running trend micro for av) stops the email integration cron from running. For some reason if any of this particular users response emails reside in the POP mailbox it stops the cron job from running with the 1093 error... will try uncommenting that but believe the problems lies somewhere in the internet email header changes that trend micro makes? grrr. Narrowed it down now. Crazy but true. Not sure where to go from here. Want the mod but if we cannot run it consistently with a variety of users and email apps I can't troubleshoot this for a group of 500± members. Am going to research but could really use some response from cyricx as this is beyond my capabilities. Any info? Thanks and best regards!

[fredang85]

Mine was working perfectly 1 day ago, but yesterday, it stopped working.

It will no longer notify me anymore threads/posts. Is there anyway to check it?

[toivo]

Hi fredang85,

You could access the mailbox and check if the messages are still there and not deleted. On the other hand, that is unlikely because the symptoms of the messages sitting in the mailbox without being deleted are multiple copies of the same message being posted and sent to members.

You could check the PHP error log to see if the script emailintegration.php has produced any errors and post them in this thread so that we can have a look at them.

At the start of emailintegration.php there is a debug switch which you can turn on to get more info sent to you. It did not seem to have any effect in my quick test but might be worth trying:

// debug command - LEAVE THIS OFF!!!
// Turning this on will stop emails from being deleted from the server!
$debug = 0;
// enter the email address error messages should go to when debug is on.
$debugemail = 'youremail@yourdomain.com';

Change it to:

$debug = 1;

and replace the email address with your own.

Regards,
toivo