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

[tekguru]

Well all was looking good to me until I replied to a post from Outlook 2007 this morning and got:




As you can see, all sorts of extra font info

[Cyricx]

Tek, please PM me your email address. I'll then send you an email that I'll have you reply to, which will give me a copy of your email format to fiddle with til i get the preg_replaces to work right

On your suggestions - Option to remove the signature when exporting the email. - not completely sure what you mean. You mean the email that you receive not having the signature?


Trala, if you have any luck with that please hollar!! I have only researched the imap route so far. I'm uncertain what other options are available to retrieve the email with php. Even the class files I've found at www.phpclasses.org all use imap functions that I could find


I'll add some of the suggestions to the future list.

[tekguru]

Not a problem, email address just sent over. It should be noted though that the first three or four messages processed through did not have the problem at all which is plain weird!

Yep the option was to send the email out minus the Signature as some of my guys do use rather long sigs

[Cyricx]

I'm gonna kinda be MIA for this afternoon and tomorrow, got some stuff going on at the homefront. Sunday I'll be back to working on this

Maybe sunday I can get a few of the options coded in and go to a 2.0 version will have to see

[Piggo]

Cyricx,
This has gotta be the fastest ever developed plugin with such a HUGE HUGE benefit, a few days, and you took if from BETA, and now almost v2.0! Way cool.
I can't believe how fast you made this, and reacted to comments here.

KUDOS
KUDOS
KUDOS

Gladly made a donation of ten bucks for the effort! Great job.

[Piggo]

Originally Posted by Tralala

Sadly, my ISP won't enable the imap_open() requirement, so I'm going to have to sit out of this one for a bit.

Darn, I'm in the same boat.

I might consider to move the whole thing over to a diffferent serve, just so I can run this!

If you find a relatively simple way of custom compiling PHP, Tralala, please let us know...

[quiklink]

So far it's working great! Still missing a few *'s and >'s in text replies but nothing major. One thing I did notice is that replies via email do not seem to be associated to the proper posts if you view the forum in Threaded or Hybrid modes. Again nothing major but might be worth looking into correcting.

It would also be good if we could customize the 'footer' of emails that are sent to change the links, add advertising, etc.

[cmwg]

Am i correct when saying that you need one mailbox per forum section ?
Would be nice to have it sort that out within the extension.
Something in the header for example
[Forum ID] [Thread ID] Title

or am i missing something and this is already implemented?

That way only one email address would be needed.

[Piggo]

Okay, still no luck; was trying to install the new/updated PHP 5 with enabled IMAP, but I have no idea how to run a .sh file. How do I execute a .sh file on a server?
Any help much appreciated.

[tekguru]

Looking at some of my font / colour issues on the email replies I'm posting into the forum when one looks at the message BBCodes on can see in:

[COLOR=#1F497D']Yeah I know Steph ? this is one of the issues the =authorhas to fix.[/color]

[COLOR=#1F497D']Ignoring away Jim [/color][COLOR=#1F497D']J[/color]

[COLOR=#1F497D']Fairy nuff keep us posted![/color]

That the ' character appears in there spuriously if that is actually removed by hand then the font format issues are fixed.

Mind you it may well be worth killing off any FONT / COLOR codes in imported messages as that would fix the issue.

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Suggestion - another useful features would be for an Admin to be able to see via the CPL who was subscribed to each forum and also have the abilitry (probably from teh same page) to add in users either by usergroup or via individual username.