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

[RichieBoy67]

I would love this for 4.2! This would most likely really increase content on many forums allowing members to just reply to a thread or post through email. I want this!

[Digital Jedi]

Originally Posted by Simon Lloyd

Good point, however, i feel someone should attempt to contact the coder as they haven't been here for 3 years.

You know, I've contacted a few different coders of some other mods who didn't specify to take the project over or mark their mod as reusable. Even on their own sites or Facebook Pages. So far, none have returned my calls. Seems some of the old coders don't even want to talk to anyone still using vB.

[andor]

vB is offering cloud solution now... well, they are really after our own forum traffic aren't they? Maybe that's why developers have jumped ship, a generational shift in platform where they aren't really welcome. Can't blame them. Mind you, this opens up opportunities for other forum developers, and there may be somewhere else we can park our interest in a few years...

This is a much requested plugin from some of my clients, so I'm very interested to see what comes of this.

[digeditor]

I tried contacting the developer some time ago with no response. I even offered to pay to have it updated for vB 4+. About then I decided that I'd have it done myself (no not by me. Too many years since I coded anything).

Not reusable? Not sure what that implies. Does it mean I can just add a new Mod? And how the heck do you do that?

It is a significant rewrite. Some of the changes which were made to it e.g. That whole "write between the lines" in the reply block area thing is now gone. That was in response to the ubiquitous use of Gmail accounts. Gmail users had trouble with that because Gmail insists on popping up this tiny box for a reply and you don't see the Mods reply box. But the basic bones are still there.

I've had it running on my forum for more than two months and made tiny changes along the way. And more will be done as I'm not enamored of the Subject line containing a thread number when thread info is in the RFC-822 headers which could be used.

Jim

[digeditor]

Originally Posted by RichieBoy67

I would love this for 4.2! This would most likely really increase content on many forums allowing members to just reply to a thread or post through email. I want this!

That's an interesting comment. I moved from a listserv to vBulletin with that exact thought in mind. The amount of flack that I caught because of the difference in email delivery was incredible.

Jim

[blind-eddie]

Though it is not marked as reusable, does not mean you can not show (In this thread) step by step instructions on all edits you had to do to get this to work on 4.0.
You can not allow any downloads, just text to show where to edit so others can do the same.

But, you would think with the way vb4 is written compared to 3.7, there should really be nothing stopping anyone from updating any pre vb4 modification to work with vb4.
Just my thoughts.

[ozzy47]

Originally Posted by blind-eddie

Though it is not marked as reusable, does not mean you can not show (In this thread) step by step instructions on all edits you had to do to get this to work on 4.0.
You can not allow any downloads, just text to show where to edit so others can do the same.

But, you would think with the way vb4 is written compared to 3.7, there should really be nothing stopping anyone from updating any pre vb4 modification to work with vb4.
Just my thoughts.

Well the underlying PHP code can be exactly the same in vB3 and vB4, the only difference is how the template is rendered, so since it is not marked reusable, it would require a complete rewrite.

It is unfortunate, but until the developer changes the status, a edited version of the mod can not be posted.

[caciocode]

Can anyone write something like the mod completely from scratch? I need this urgently for my forum. I would add some donation to get it started.