Discussion: Forum participation by email

I think most people read message board only once a day.

They would like to receive the daily report of all new messages from the selected threads or forums for the appropriate time. That wouldn't get much resources from the server.

Also, don't forget about undelivered mail when user's e-mail account isn't working anymore. The script must gather statistics about all mail returning back and automatically remove subscriptions from those accounts that don't reply for the selected period of time.

[RobAC]

Here's an idea.....would it be possible to use tubedogg's Community Bulletin Generator hack as a base....add in the option to allow the user to choose either a daily, weekly or monthly receipt and tie it into a cron job?

[chrispadfield]

sending emails is the easiest bit, it is allowing for replies that is the hardest. All the work i had done was on sorting out replies. I am currently working on this pop3 class for another project and there is a chance i will have a go at it again when that is finished.

The community bulletin generator can be run as cron (if php is stored in apache you need to run it throuh a lynx command (thanks sitepointforums.com !).

The board could send an e-mail with
nicely formatted html-attachment, maybe zipped.

html page could consist of tables for every
thread with colors but without graphical elements.

And three or more links at the bottom of every table:
post message, post thread, remove subscription
like

<a href="mailto:forum@forum.com?subject=act=pm|||user id=1|||userpassword=777777|||threadid=1">post message</a>

A user could download this e-mail and then write his answers offline.
That would reduce his Internet access costs and attract more dialup
users to the forum.

By the way, why do you need pop3 module?

You can simply add the new entry in aliases file for sendmail like:
forum: "|/home/forum/emailarrive.sh"

When the new e-mail arrives it's piped to the shell program that can parse it.

[chrispadfield]

Originally posted by Ivan
By the way, why do you need pop3 module?

You can simply add the new entry in aliases file for sendmail like:
forum: "|/home/forum/emailarrive.sh"

When the new e-mail arrives it's piped to the shell program that can parse it.

you probably don't, but i can't program in shell so php was going to be the way i would do it. also, not everyone uses sendmail, i for instance use qmail.

bump/subscribe

DiscusPro has this feature, which is very handy. You can subscribe by "forum" to receive each post in your mailbox. Very handy, especially if you have a spare POP box.

[rawnet]

Hi James,

Just wondering if you ever managed to achieve this?

It is a massive job - looks like you were interested in doing it almost a year ago now, but was wondering if you followed it up. I wish vBulletin would integrate this kind of functionality as an option - it would boost it to a position that could not be contended by any other forum software.

Some people get confused about email notification and do try replying via email - it is much easier and quicker than logging into the web and should increase the number of posts dramatically.

[BustaCap]

I would be really interested in this hack as well. Is there hope of an eventual release?

[JamesUS]

I would absolutely love to do something like this...but I just haven't had the time this last year. I will see what I can come up with in the next few weeks, as it should be a tad easier than it would have been last year when it would have been based on vB 1.1.x.

Though I'm still slightly reluctant to do any major hacks before v3 is at least in private beta, as the whole vB backend is changing around with the new release.