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

[fxs158]

Allow Attachments?
Do you wish to process attachments in emails?

Yes

Allow all attachment types?
Do you wish to allow all attachment types from emails? If so, select yes. By selecting no, an error message will be sent to anyone who tries to send an email with attachment types that are not listed in the Attachment Manager.

No

Enable Forum Links
If set to Yes this will enable the below links in the footers of emails. If no, no links will display for any of the below items regardless of their individual settings.

Yes

Homepage Link?
Do you wish to enable the homepage link in the emails?

Yes

Forums Link?
Do you wish to enable the forums link in the emails?

Yes

Calendar Link?
Do you wish to enable the calendar link in the emails?

No

Memberlist Link?
Do you wish to enable the memberlist link in the emails?

No

Search Forums Link?
Do you wish to enable the search forums link in the emails?

Yes

The other email links show fine, just the one posted above has the space between php to ph p and that causes link to be bad. the unsubscribe link does not seem to be properlly formated either.

Also could you tell me how to enable cron or whateverscript to pull the emails from my server into this program.

[Cyricx]

The cron is automatically enabled, it's ported with the product xml

Set your settings up in the forum manager, and then try running the cron from the scheduled tasks manually to be certain your connection type is correct. If it is, it'll say Done!, if it isn't you'll get one of the errors listed in the first post of FAQs

Is that link coming up bad for a newthread, or a new reply? Or is it coming up bad for both for you?

[fxs158]

I am gettting this error

Email Integration

Warning: require_once(/public_html/forums/includes/functions_threadprefix.php) [function.require-once]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 43

Fatal error: require_once() [function.require]: Failed opening required '/public_html/forums/includes/functions_threadprefix.php' (include_path='.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php') in /public_html/forums/includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 43

will try all settings to see if it works.

[Corys8646]

did you comment out the thread prefix line in the cron job? assuming you aren't using the mod

[fxs158]

Originally Posted by Corys8646

did you comment out the thread prefix line in the cron job? assuming you aren't using the mod

that took care of it! Thanks! messages importing just fine!

[cynthetiq]

What about filtering out spam emails?

mail2forum has a method of using regex to setup rules that the inbound emails are checked against.

my phpbb forum keeps out alot of extra spam that way. Is there something in this mod that does handle it as well?

[Cyricx]

Spam emails would have to come from one of your users or be configured to match the email address of one of the users.

I've never used or messed with regex, so I'd have to do some reading on that to see how it works.

[Cyricx]

Actually... wait, if I understand the description of regex correctly, I'm doing that already...

it's using preg_match and preg_replace, which I do.

Exactly what does m2f do to match a user to an email? (don't have time to dig through all their code and decode it all to figure it out )

[fxs158]

I am not sure I understand how the mod works, however the more I think about it; I am a little concerned about security.

Could someone just fake my email address and post as me?

[Cyricx]

Not any way that I know how. At least not without having access to your outgoing mailserver and password.

Even for example, yahoo, when I set it up to look like I'm sending email from cyricx(at)mmogcommunities(dot)com when someone reads my emails, it'll show as coming from that address, and reply to will be to that address.

While that email address is actually a forwarder that forwards email to my yahoo account.

When I send an email to the site to be processed as a post, it sees my yahoo address. It ignores all the reply to and sending as junk. Goes straight to the guts