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

[riahiarshia]

Where is the info to add users to certain forums be default. I realize this is not the correct place to talk about this. I would appreciate if you just point me to the right direction.

-Alex

[toivo]

You can give a group like Registered users the access rights to the forums, and the users will then have the default access.

[kevinh]

Originally Posted by riahiarshia

Where is the info to add users to certain forums be default. I realize this is not the correct place to talk about this. I would appreciate if you just point me to the right direction.

-Alex

I think you might mean this;

in admicp

vBulletin Options > vBulletin Options > Email Intergration - check out the very last option
"User's can choose to not auto subscribe?" set it to "No" and all new users will be subscribed to forums which are enabled for that usergroup.

In the management for each forum under Forum Manager in AdminCP, you need to enter the ID of each [S]forum[/S] usergroup which can use EI.

Kevin

[kevinh]

Toivo,
Many thanks for that php code to run access the forums via a cron job, I have it installed and it seems to work well.

It's a bit like the final piece in the EI puzzle

Regards,
Kevin

[kevinh]

[S]Actually, there is still one piece missing for me. [/S]

I worked it out

[kevinh]

Does anyone know why we might be getting some messages repeated with html code in them like this (see below). When I say repeated, the message came through twice - once formatted correctly and once with html at the beginning and end. Only the clean vserion ended up on the forum. This is the beginning of the email wihc went out to subscribers to the forum;

<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<style>
<!--
body {
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
}
table {
margin-top: 1em;
}
td {
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 80%;
}
th {
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 80%;
}
alt2 {
background-color: #FFFFFF;
font-family: Verdana, Geneva, Arial, helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 80%;
}
-->
</style>
</head>
<body><div id="ei_reply">
Please type your reply below this line.<br>
<strong>NB:</strong> Your reply will be automatically be posted on the web forum!
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-






-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
(Please type your reply above this line)

You may increase the space between the above lines as needed.


</div>
<div id="ei_body">
______________________
CURRENT MESSAGE FROM: geo

Vitessebooks (of Aachen, NRW, Germany) have this
at US$ 234.06, and this seems to be the
English-language edition from Copress Sport,
M?nchen (1996) -despite the German description.
To quote "Englischer Text. Nat?rlich 328 Seiten
!" It has the same number of pages as on the
Bentley link, incidentally, it weighs a hefty
1.8kg! Curiously, Copress Sport Verlag only has
Simons' early BMW book (up to 1932) on its own
site.


George

[kevinh]

Suggestion::

Almost all the users on my site are accustomed to basic mail lists where the From address is that of the poster (with the return address that of the mail list).

I know the reasons why we wouldn't want to do this with vBulletin and EI, but it could be useful to have the from address as "poster username" <forum email address>

This would make it much easier to identify posts from a specific sender.

[kevinh]

We are now running this on a live forum and I thought it might be worth sharing some of the issues we have come across;

1. We had a small number of posts by email that displayed the html code in the email - we seem to have solved this by switching to plain text in the settings.
   
2. Users clicked 'reply' after receiving an email notification of a new post, then cleared the whole email composition window and typed their reply, resulting in a new thread being created by EI.
   
3. Users accidentally editing the dashed lines resulting in the whole reply email being puiblished in the forum, rather than what was just between the dashed lines - I'm surprised this wasn't treated as a new thread by EI.
   
4. One user couldn't figure out why he couldn't type his reply between the dashed lines before he clicked 'reply', (he thought it was because he was using a Mac!).
   
5. Users have also experienced some formatting/line break issues, possibly because their email text has been pasted from another application.
   
6. We have noticed that some users tend to reply to any email with a completely unrelated post which belongs in another forum. In this instance we move the post, however if another user respond to the original post by email, their reply ends up in the original forum, rather than the forum the post was moved to.

Although all but one of these are user related problems, they should be considered carefully before using EI on a large, busy vBulletin site, because it could easily create a heavy admin load for the site owner.

[riahiarshia]

Is there a way to install root certificates for EI? Our IT just implemented this and we can no longer retrieve messages from the exchange server.

-Alex

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by riahiarshia

Is there a way to install root certificates for EI? Our IT just implemented this and we can no longer retrieve messages from the exchange server.

-Alex

Try using one of the connection options of with officially signed certificates or unofficial.

That should change the connection to the correct port.