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

[Abbas]

Excellent script- almost exactly what I was looking for- just had one question regarding the possible functionality:

At the moment, I receive news in email that I post to one of the forums which is picked up by my homepage. With this script, I can simply fwd the email that gets posted on the forum and picks up on the home page and its working great. The only functionality I would love is the ability to add Tags to the post on vB by maybe adding a line at the end of the email saying Tags: xxx

Is that a possibility?

Regards

[leitel]

Originally Posted by AyeCapn

I suspect this has been brought up before, but couldn't find anything. When a thread is ut into moderation it still generates an email before the moderation is approved or denied. Can the email be delayed until moderation approval is given?

I am having emails of unmoderated posts go out. This is one way to quickly discourage participation from the very groups that are integral to our site. I will go fishing to hack around this but if this has already been addressed that would be great!!

[Quantnet]

Does this work with latest version vb 3.8 beta?

[GlamRockTalk]

I haven't started to do much research on this mod just yet. But, I was wondering if there was a way to put advertisements automatically into the 'message'? If so, how would it be done?

If I'm going to add this, I need to make sure that my site sponsors are not affected by less folks visiting and only replying via e-mail. If I can edit the 'message' sent with the actual thread/post, then we'll be fine.

[pjcnlv]

Great mod. I think I can abandon the very unreliable (as of late) Google Groups with this.

I noticed earlier in this thread that you were working on the creation of thumbnails for embedded images. Has this progressed?

I would really like to have the users on the forum/archive see the thumbnail and be able to launch the full size image in the VBulletin environment.

Thanks much!

[pjcnlv]

Okay, I have this working however, the system is simply sending out the canned messages for new posts to a forum when folks are subscribed to receive same.

The subject line of the emails sent out looks like this

"New Post/Thread Notification: (real forum name)"

The actual message subject line when posted was "TEST @Baja.net".

How can I fix this?

I think this is also preventing me from sending an email back to a thread so that the post becomes properly threaded on the forum.

[asiegel]

Hi,

I was wondering if there was any progress made around using this addon with forums that are password protected?

Thanks!
a

[ArnyVee]

So, I've got a question.

I recently installed a mobile style on my forums. I've been asked if there is an option where someone could send a picture from their mobile device to the forums and have it post automatically.

When they asked this, I thought of this mod. But, not sure if it's possible.

Is this something that I can do with this mod? If so, is it difficult to setup?

[toivo]

Images do not seem to travel well with this mod. I commented out some checks it was doing and still had to recommend to users to rather create the post in the forum with attachments or embedded images than send attachments through email.

Off the topic: Outlook 2003 wraps long urls to the next line when the line exceeds 72 characters. There is a workaround: go to Tools - Options - Mail Format - International Options and deselect 'Auto select encoding for outgoing messages' and then select Western European (ISO) as the 'Preferred encoding for outgoing messages'. No broken URLs after this change.

Regards,

[ArnyVee]

Originally Posted by ArnyVee

So, I've got a question.

I recently installed a mobile style on my forums. I've been asked if there is an option where someone could send a picture from their mobile device to the forums and have it post automatically.

When they asked this, I thought of this mod. But, not sure if it's possible.

Is this something that I can do with this mod? If so, is it difficult to setup?

I just did some searching through this mod's pages (sure are a lot of 'em!) and found a couple of instances where folks were referred to PhotoPost for what I'm suggesting above. But, after speaking with the folks at PhotoPost, they no longer support the ability to upload pictures via a mobile device (even though it states it in the features). So, I'm glad that I asked before purchasing it.

Anyone else have any suggestions?