Major Additions - Email Integration (New Threads/Replies by and through email!)

This modification allows you to mimic email lists such as yahoo groups through your forums!

Complete with the user's receiving emails for new threads and replies AND being able to reply directly from email or sending a new email to start a new thread!

Just like email lists, you will need a separate email box for EACH forum that you have this enabled for!!

After installing this modification in the forum manager you will enter the settings for each forum to connect to it's own email box.

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 in one of two formats that you as the administrator decide. One format has a "reply box" and is the most sure fire way of not getting excess email crap ont he forums. The second format (noted as "Old" format) keeps an email in its base pure form with some attempts at quoting messages. Examples of both are 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!

IMAP
You MUST have php imap functions enabled on your server to use this modification! You do not need to have IMAP installed, just have to enable php to use the functions by recompiling it with imap enabled!

If you are upgrading from the version
for vbulletin 3.6.x , see below!

BUGS!
These are the known bugs to date:

• Unconfirmed 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!

• 2.5 Release
• • New Features
    • Email Integration now uses vbmail! This DOES require one small file edit.
• 2.5.1 Release -
  • New Feature -
    • Added some debug triggers in the cron file. Turning on debug will stop email sfrom being deleted after they are processed and if a message errors out, the error email will be sent to an admin specified email address which is set in the cron file.
  • Bug Fixes -
    • Fixed incorrect call to plain text parsing. (this is the cause of the duplicate posting/undefined function errors)
    • Corrected security hole.
    • Corrected a typo in the error message for attachments that are too large.
    • Rebuilt the method of determining attachment types vs max size to handle more then 2 attachments. Previous code would not process more then 2 attachments.
    • Added a call to determine the parentid for replies if one isn't specified prior to the post being added to the database from emails.
    • Fixed a bug where previous messages were blank in new layout for posts that didn't have a parentid specified.
• 2.5.2 Release
  • Bug Fixes
    • Fixed bug with new users not being automatically subscribed to forums when it is enabled for their usergroup.
    • Added a dirty regex fix for utf-8 encoded filenames.
• 2.5.3 Release
  • Bug Fixes
    • Fixed bug that displayed "Set All Instant" on User CP Subscribe Forums page when no forums were setup for Instant Email Notification.
    • Fixed bug that allowed forums that were set inactive to appear on the User CP SUbscribe Forums page.
    • Fixed bug with the how the "New Layout" processs improving how it tries to remove the first layer of > signs in replies.
  • Improvement/Bug Fix
    • Changed the field in the Forum Manager for forum['ei_usergroups'] so that it now controls not only who can reply via email. But who can receive instant notification emails. It is now titled "Please enter the usergroup IDs that can use this feature."
    • Added the phrase "You may increase the space between the above lines as needed." to the "New Layout" email templates to alleviate user confusion.
• 2.5.4 Release
  • Bug Fixes
    • Added a quickfix for a bug that caused a function error when replying to a thread that a user was subscribed to while in a forum that was enabled for Email Integration.
  • Error Checks Added
    • Added a function exists check to the cron file and the search settings page to warn people when they have not correctly enabled imap functions.
• 2.5.5 Release
  • Bug Fixes
    • Added a check to subscribeforum.php to not display subscription options for forums that are links.
    • Fixed a bug that caused the cron to incorrectly list the username and signature in the emails. (The post processed to the forums were correct, it was just the emails that were screwy sometimes.)
    • Slightly modified phrase and variables for replies so that if a post has a title, it'll use that title for the email, if not, it'll use the thread title like before.
• 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 3.7x

Upgrading from version for 3.6.x

• Due to using different product ID's due to the changes that will be coming up for the version for vbulletin 3.7.x you will need to uninstall the 3.6.x version and install the 3.7.x version in this thread. My apologies for the inconvienance, I've been unable to determine an alternative with the 3.6.x version still in development due to the last few bugs.

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

[roalaik]

I am looking for answers if I can import users from google groups or yahoo groups

[yaku]

One warning about this hack: the emails will contain the poster's IP address if you don't use a SMTP server rather than the internal PHP mail() function.

[TBrewerton]

I have also just tried this on 3.8 and can only get e-mails to send yet cant reply respond to the boards.

Please can we get an urgent update as my board relies on this mod and i would love to upgrade.

Thanks,

Tim

[optrex]

Please add me to the list too for a 3.8 upgrade. Nothing incoming, presumably due to re-captcha.

[mjname]

Has anyone tried this with Blog? I would love to be able just update my blog with this.

[mykkal]

Can a hook be made to tie into the FaceBook Connect Mod? That mod allows users to register and sign into forums using their facebook ID's. I am using email integration and the once a user has registered they can use the email intergration to post.

But FaceBook connect also allows a user to post directly to thier facebook profiles a "note" with the title of the thread. This note redirects back to the actual forum thread.

Is it possible to get a hook made that will publish these threads when the user logs in or that will publis the threads to facebook when the email is recieved?

Facebook connect mod:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=198499

also... where is the 3.8 version?

[rodneytamblyn]

Hi Cyricx,

A few email integration woes today.

I have about 15 forums enabled with EI addresses. A user complained that mails being sent to one of the addresses were not being delivered. I ran the cron job manually and discovered it complaining:

Fatal error:
* The text that you have entered is too long (10328 characters). Please shorten it to 10000 characters long.
Unable to proceed with save while $errors array is not empty in class vb_datamanager_thread_firstpost in [path]/includes/class_dm.php on line 810

Fair enough, I increased the maximum post length. Bad mistake. Turns out there were a lot of messages queued up in other forum email accounts. The system went crazy and generated thousands of email messages before I realised what was going on.

Next issue I found:

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /Users/oceanbrowser/Sites/forum/includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 1615

This has been referred to elsewhere, I applied the fix changing that line to $plaintext_parser->set_parsing_language( 1 )

However I also got this error which I haven't seen reported:
Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /Users/oceanbrowser/Sites/forum/includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 1093

Applied your fix to that line too.

Next I got this error:

Fatal error:
* This forum requires that you wait 30 seconds between posts. Please try again in 30 seconds.
Unable to proceed with save while $errors array is not empty in class vb_datamanager_post in [path]/includes/class_dm.php on line 810

It's very difficult to work out which forum is affected. Would be great if the error messages in the cron also outputted the details of the email message being processed (which would also show the forum being sent to)

I still haven't solved the last above issue, have disabled EI in the forum tonight and will have to spend more time tomorrow investigating that.

The installation documentation should warn users to check the maximum post length and be aware that if an email comes in that exceeds this length it will stop ALL processing of emails in all lists - i.e. when an error occurs the cron job doesn't log it and continues, it aborts. And if you change that setting later, it can initiate an email flood if you have an accumulated backlog of messages.

For some reason (also TBD) EI posted the same messages over and over into the forum - I think it was erroring out before it had a chance to delete the messages (?) then next time the script ran, it posted them again. Would be good if the posting mechanism checked for duplicate post, and also if there could be some in-build flood protection measures.

~ Rodney

[rodneytamblyn]

In the email integration cron job I am seeing this error message (below). Any ideas how to resolve this issue?

Thanks

~ Rodney

Email Integration

Fatal error:

* This forum requires that you wait 30 seconds between posts. Please try again in 30 seconds.

Unable to proceed with save while $errors array is not empty in class vb_datamanager_post in [path]/includes/class_dm.php on line 810

[mykkal]

I had to uninstall this mod removing an important feature of vBulletin becuase it doesn't work with 3.8.1.

I've asked in the forum but haven't got any replies on when Email Intergration for 3.8 would work.

This is messed up. Be nice if we had an update.

[beishe8]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

Not dead. Just on haitus.

Economy and real life.

Going through a separation plus having to get extra income where I can leaves me with little time to devote to this right now.

But it's definately not going to die. As soon as I get the time I've got alot planned for this.

Funny how time can be so very elusive though..

I was excited when you started to develop this hack but as I see you do not have the time to further improve it.
With 3.8 it's not working at all because of the changes in vB's code.
Isn't it possible to offer it to vB.org's hackers to make the final touches to it?

All the best, beishe8