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

[snoopy5]

Hi


1. Is it possible to use this plugin only one-way? I.e. only to send e-mails with all postings of the board out, but without the option to reply by mail?

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.

2. Is this step above a "have to"? Is it possible with the scenario #1 to use only one e-mail address for the whole vb-board? I want my users to get all postings, no matter which subforum.

3. Is there a daily digest an option in ACP available?

Thanks in advance

[ArnyVee]

Originally Posted by ArnyVee

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?

I just noticed that Utterli.com and Flickr.com have the capability to receive pics from mobile devices. And, I think that they can then 'send' them to an e-mail address (as an attachment?). If that's the case, I can use that product to 'receive' the picture and then have it send the pic to my forum using this mod.

Does that make sense? Should it work?

[JohnNM]

Originally Posted by JohnNM

Hi Chris,

It has been a while since I installed this excellent mod. Thanks for your earlier help to get some of the minor wrinkles worked out. I have a strange problem that I could use your help with.

I have several hundred users on my forum now. Out of these users, as near as I can tell, only two of us are receiving duplicate emails from every forum post. When you go into the UserCP -> EditOptions -> Format For Email Integration and change from Text to HTML, you then get one email in text and the other in HTML. This is about the only clue I have to go on right now.

The only other information I can think to give you is that I am running 3.68 Patch 2 (yes, I know I need to upgrade - not enough cycles in the day yet), and that one of the users is a RegisteredUser, and I am an Administrator. Any help you might give would be very appreciated.

Brad

For others - found the problem. The user had registered once with an email address, had forgotten their password and so had registered again using a different user name but the same email address. I deleted the extra user and the duplicate emails stopped.

Brad

[moodog]

is there away to change the character count?

I get this on large emails.

Fatal error:

* The text that you have entered is too long (15076 characters). Please shorten it to 10000 characters long.

thanks for any help..

[Zothos68]

Hello.

Will this mod be compatible with the new 3.8 version that's being released soon?

Thank you in advance for your help.

- Zothos68

[Fungsten]

Originally Posted by Zothos68

Hello.

Will this mod be compatible with the new 3.8 version that's being released soon?

Thank you in advance for your help.

- Zothos68

I have 3.8 and can get it to notify me if there is a new post but I cannot get the reply to post. I've changed the settings in but the replies still do not post. TIA.

[Fungsten]

Question!! Why doesn't the forum that receives the email show there is a new post in that forum until you click on the forum? Also the post count does not increase. TIA.

[tommythejoat]

I have one bug and one suggestion to report.

Bug: when the mod processes an email with an attachment it computes the attachmentid incorrectly. The one I was just looking at was off by 4. The attachment also does not have the proper thumbnail in the post on the message board. However, if you click on the pseudo-url it does get translated to the actual attachmentid.

Suggestion: In an active discussion, the ability of users to edit a post creates a situation where different material goes out in the email than is on the message board. When a user is composing his email reply he sees the unedited post, but everyone else sees the edited version when the software processes the post and generates the next email.

If possible, the mod should check the time of the post and the board edit time limit then delay sending out the post for that period. Alternatively, it could check the editable status of the post and delay sending the email until the post is no longer editable.

That will cover everything except edits by admins and moderators. I don't see any solution for that without a lot of work to generated another "corrected" email with a suitable format to show that it is a previous one that has been edited. This problem also exists on Yahoo Groups if the list owner edits the on-line archive to remove bad stuff.

I am currently running 3.7.3 pl 1

[ThePiston]

I downloaded this last year and am a little disappointed it hasn't progressed any further... I thought this mod would be huge. oh well.

[asiegel]

Hi,

I was wondering if this addon works as expected in v3.8 of vbulletin

Any feedback is appreciated!

Thanks,
a