Forums v Email Discussion lists, a suggestion

Another forum

http://www.sitescape.com/forum.html

but don't worry vbulletin, don't think many will convert. It is different and "slightly" more expensive.

Anyway.. why posting?

This is the feature i liked the look of:

Users can email to a designated address, whereupon Forum will post it in the appropriate forum as a new entry.

what do you think?

lots of people out there like using email discussion lists. Personally i hate em but i think it would be possible to turn vbulletin into the ability to have both.

How does it work?

Well people subscribe to a discussion list. This is in fact a forum of your forum.

Say forum name is book talk

When someone posts a thread or a post then everyone who email subscribes to the forum gets an email with the message. Can set it up to do an email for every post, an email once a day or an email say at 25 posts (like egroups).

People can also send posts by email. To do this they send email:

forumname@yourdomain.com

now if the subject is say "Re I like Grisham"
then this post will get added to the thread "I like Grisham"

see what i mean?

This way the forum acts as BOTH a web based forum and an email one. I would love that it would be brilliant. I can think of a few egroups lists that would then convert over to my forum brining in massive traffic and massive member base.

I think the hardest bit is going to be error checking the email addresses (only from subscribed users) and making it easy for a reply to a post so that the post gets put in the forum in the correct place.

I would love to hear suggestions on this. I might install the software i just found (has a free trial) to see how it works. What do you think? I really hope someone is interested in this enough to think about making it. I would love to but please complete ignorance

A good site is http://www.i-nieuws.vuurwerk.nl/i-questions/index.html

When you send an email with a special ID in it, it will place the message automaticly on the site with that ID.
It's Dutch, but I think you know the idea.

Jan
http://www.icqforum.f2s.com/php/

i wish i did. it appears a lot of the good sites for this are written in french/german

at the moment i am trying to decide whether to use IMAP commands or POP3 access ones. IMAP is easier but the problem is that you have to compile it with PHP that not everyone does (me included). But an extra advantage is that is the protoc used for NNTP access to newsgroups.

POP3 is the other way to go and it is a little harder than i thought, still getting there. Currently running through headers to take out the sections that will be needed.. some progess

Well, you could email the webmaster ofcourse..

Jan
http://www.icqforum.f2s.com/php

I've decided to give this hack a go - so if you have any more comments/suggestions/ideas please post in this thread. I will post a more detailed plan in a day or two once I have it all worked out in my mind