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

[jdj]

I remain interested in EMI, but I also deployed vB4.0 last week and I'm just getting to grips with it. The threads seem to have RSS feed buttons on them which you can just click on. I haven't had a chance to play with these yet but presumably you can just set them up to feed what's circulating on a particular forum to your inbox. Anyone know whether you could design a mod or take part of EMI to reply to a forum in response to something being delivered from a RSS feed rather than starting again from scratch?

JJ

[Cyricx]

I've got a private mod (not related to EMI) that I've got to finish first, but I'll post as soon as I start upgrading this to vb4.0 which will be soon because I want to get my forums up to 4.0 too

jdj - The issues that I battle through are all related to processing replies from emails as they come in. So the RSS function as they go out wouldn't help with the problem spots at all.

[testbot]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

I've got a private mod (not related to EMI) that I've got to finish first, but I'll post as soon as I start upgrading this to vb4.0 which will be soon because I want to get my forums up to 4.0 too

jdj - The issues that I battle through are all related to processing replies from emails as they come in. So the RSS function as they go out wouldn't help with the problem spots at all.

how's this going?

[toivo]

Here is a quick-fix of patches to EI Mod to support moderated forums, cloned from the existing code in EI Mod. The patch modifies emailintegration.php and two of its plugins, adds two custom hooks to moderate.php and installs a product with four plugins.

In limited testing under 3.8.4 this patch allowed moderation from the Admin Control Panel, Moderator Control Panel and from inline moderation.

The only differences to the earlier version tested in 3.6.8, available from https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...151222&page=67, are the two INSERT statements in the installation instructions in the file Install.384.txt.

Toivo

[jdj]

This may be a bit convoluted, but if this mod works with 3.8.4 is there a way to set up a "dummy" or "server" installation of 3.8.4 to run EMI and "share" the posts with an installation of 4.0? I mean, is it possible to get the two installations to connect to the same MySQL database?

JJ

[kevinh]

I'm trying to get some outbound mail delay issues resolved and the guys who look after my server need to know whether EI sends mail using smtp authentication or just using the mail() php function?

I'm not a developer so I don't really know. Can someone please advise

[testbot]

i haven't looked at the code and i'm not the developer for this mod but i would guess that it uses vbmail which is a vbulletin mail function.

[toivo]

If vBulletin Options - Email Options - SMTP Email has this explanation:

Set this option to yes to use an SMTP server rather than the internal PHP mail() function.

EI Mod uses the standard vbmail() function which selects one of the following, depending on the configuration in SMTP Email:

1. vB_SmtpMail = SMTP wrapper
2. vb_Mail = PHP Mail() function

These classes can be found in includes/class_mail.php.

[kevinh]

Many thanks guys, that's exactly what I needed to know

I had forgotten about that batch sending feature. When mail is set to be sent in batches, does anyone know what the delay is between batches?

[toivo]

The processing of the mail queue is triggered by each rendered page. The function exec_mail_queue() is called from exec_shut_down() close to the bottom of includes/functions.php.