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

[Cyricx]

So..

I wanted to give everyone a peek at the way I'm working on the emails to look. This is the plain text version.

I certainly plan to have a full html version of the email either in this next build or shortly thereafter depending on my luck with vbmail's system. And the html emails would look like a blend of this plain text format and the current emails that are sent out for the current build.

To give a little insight into my thoughts and why I'm going for this format:

As I was dealing with some of the different online businesses I started to notice that more and more were going to an email system where you needed to reply between Line X and Line Y. This let them be sure that they were cutting up the email correctly and getting your reply right.

It kept things from getting messy with previous messages coming through in pieces, ads were gone, etc.

The thing i didn't like about them, is they had like 3 paragraphs of bs text and then the lines and more text. It almost obscured where you needed to put your message.

I tried to address that concern.

The biggest benefit is the regex's for this would be VERY simple. The forum posts will look GREAT! because they won't have the other messages quoted a billion times. AND the emails you get, have the current message AND the message that person was replying too!


Anyway, I'm pretty damn set on this format, but did want to give everyone a chance to peek at it before it rolled out.

The open reply format just proved to be almost impossible to keep things even halfway neat lookin

[RWerksman]

Looks great!

[capsize]

The new format looks great! I'm all for a format that keeps posts free of clutter and ads.

In that spirit, I've got a feature request:

Since many of the users of this mod are migrating from Yahoo! groups (like I am), it would be nice to have a way to discard all attachments but keep the text portions. Right now, if attachments are disabled, then a post with an attachment gets rejected and returned to the sender. In addition to the current "reject attachments" and "post attachments" modes of handling incoming emailed posts, it would be nice to add a third "discard attachments" mode. When a message with attachments is mailed to Yahoo! groups, the text portions get posted with the following line appended at the end of the post:
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Thanks for all the good work, Cyricx!

[Cyricx]

Capsize,

That's an easy one! I've added that in and it will make it to the next version

[Sorky]

I've been watching this closely as we are also replacing an old email list and want to minimize the impact of the change.

I presume that a new email sent and converted straight to a post would not have any "lines" and would therefore simply post everything.

I personally don't like the idea of having to type between the lines as many users have an email signature that they would have to scroll down below to do a reply... If you only had a single line that said "do not type below this line as nothing under this line will be posted", that would be a simple backup to allow the effective stripping of the previous email information.

BTW : This is all looking really good - great work.

[Cyricx]

I actually started with that Sorky, unfortunately with almost every email program it left some kinda line like

Cyricx wrote:

At the bottom of each message, that varied by browser by settings The only other solution I could come up with that would be 100% reliable, was the inbetween lines thing.

I think that is the most important step that I need to work this towards. 100% reliability.

You are correct though if the post is a new thread it will not do anything more then make sure there isn't any left over html hanging around.

Replies, it will make the email appear like a normal regular post when it hits the forums.

Basically, the cron job checks the headers of the email for the message id "in_reply_to". If it has the emailintegration jazz in there, it's a reply and it parses and cleans it up. If it doesn't its a new thread and it just cleans up some html.


All, just a note into where I'm at and what I've done so far

• Added option to dismiss attachments.
• Cleaned the subject line, no more [forumname-91] subject, it's now just [forumname] subject
• Completely fixed the code to work for threaded and hybrid mode by correctly setting the parentid
• Fixed the bug in the attachment system.

Current items I am working on simultaneously are:

• reformatted emails (25% done)
• enable user selectable plain or html emails, with an admin override (10%)

Other things that will make it into the next version?

Have to wait and see what comes up.

[Sorky]

I hate to flog a dead horse, but...

What if a user simply clicks reply and types away without scrolling down and putting the reply in the correct place... Will it post a blank message on the forum? Will it discard his email as empty? Will he be notified that he made a mistake?

That was my last word on this - you are the expert and it's your product, so however you finish up is ok ;-)

[RWerksman]

I'd like to suggest that if blank, the system disregards the post.

Additionally, if we're only talking text based content, what would the use of sending an HTML based email be? If email application (Outlook, Thunderbird, most web-based deals such as Hotmail & Yahoo!) automagically convert the link in the text based mail to a hyperlink or image, what more is needed?

...or am I being schtupid?

[columbusgeek]

I am excited. I feared this cool idea would die.

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by RWerksman

I'd like to suggest that if blank, the system disregards the post.

Additionally, if we're only talking text based content, what would the use of sending an HTML based email be? If email application (Outlook, Thunderbird, most web-based deals such as Hotmail & Yahoo!) automagically convert the link in the text based mail to a hyperlink or image, what more is needed?

...or am I being schtupid?

The reason for sending plain text is that some browsers do not like html emails. Using the current code in 2.3.1 I have one user that actually receives blank emails because their settings deny html emails.

Noone will block plain text, many people seem to block html.

I do NOT intend to do away with html. I'm actually trying to work it now so that it is an option.

The admin can choose to let user's decide, or can force the script to use a particular format. If they admin let's user's decide then they will have an option in their messaging & notification options to choose plain text or html. It will default to plain text.

This has been a REAL learning experience to going from, hey it looks great to me.. to... how COULD it look for someone else..

Originally Posted by Sorky

I hate to flog a dead horse, but...

What if a user simply clicks reply and types away without scrolling down and putting the reply in the correct place... Will it post a blank message on the forum? Will it discard his email as empty? Will he be notified that he made a mistake?

That was my last word on this - you are the expert and it's your product, so however you finish up is ok ;-)

The code remains intact to disregard blank messages and sends an error message email to the user. Same as if they sent a blank post. I will likely customize the error message for replies to mention the box though.

This is also the reason for the box being SOO close to the top. They can't miss it if they are going to read the message anyway