Discussion: Forum participation by email

The only problem is moderating the pop3 account. I am looking into a similar solution that would use a daemon to monitor incoming email. However since we use qmail, it would not be necessarily portable to other systems.

This daemon would call a PHP script everytime a new message arrives and feed it the message. This would then put the message in the database properly. Using a CRON job can cause your messages to get out of sync and create confusing threads. The best way to do it automatically is through a daemon.

There would be no reason to send the userid with the message because you will have the email address in the "Sender" field of the email. If it isn't an address from a valid vBulletin user you simply send back a auto-response saying that the message wasn't allowed and send it to /dev/null. This is the same way YahooGroups (formerly eGroups) works.

Basically I see a clean header looking like:
#XXXXXXX This is the thread Subject

Where the XXXXXX represents the Threadid. There is really no reason for anything else to be included. With the Threadid you can put it where it belongs and with the email address in the "Sender" field you can match it with the user.

If only the senders email is checked users can easily fake someone else's ID; Just configure their email-address in you mail program as your email adress...

Originally posted by Mas*Mind
If only the senders email is checked users can easily fake someone else's ID; Just configure their email-address in you mail program as your email adress...

VERY good point...

Another point to consider: You could do something similar to Yahoo! Groups / eGroups where the to field determines where it goes. e.g. This forum is called vBulletin Code Hacks. To send a post via email to it, address the email to vbulletin_code_hacks@vbulletin.com and that would help sort them on the way in. For a site with hundreds of forums (ascifi.com comes to mind), that could either be a help (pre-sorting makes it a little more efficient) or a hinderance (too many addresses to keep track of), but for a site like this or like SPF, it wouldn't be too bad.

Originally posted by tubedogg
Another point to consider: You could do something similar to Yahoo! Groups / eGroups where the to field determines where it goes. e.g. This forum is called vBulletin Code Hacks. To send a post via email to it, address the email to vbulletin_code_hacks@vbulletin.com and that would help sort them on the way in. For a site with hundreds of forums (ascifi.com comes to mind), that could either be a help (pre-sorting makes it a little more efficient)

I actually like that idea - I have over 140 forums and this would make it much cleaner!

Really we don't need to think about Forums on a reply. The forumid simply doesn't matter since the post is attached to a created thread so for 90% of incoming mails this is irrelevant.

Using a full-featured email program, you can direct them to a "Catch-All account" that will be watched to and have emails pulled from it.

AS far as the email and password thing, eGroups doesn't require this and is able to catch it so there must be a way to do it. Granted they handle it in the email daemon because most scripts would be too "stupid" and could be fooled.

How does MajorDomo handle these things? Anyone pull it apart yet?

Having email participation is interesting, but it should be configurable by forum.

I have forums where I want to send email to subscribers containing the contents of messages posted, however I want them to have to come back to the site to participate in the discussion.

I also have forums where participation by email would be great in both directions, and the forum would act principally as an archive.

I bought vBulletin in the first place because I did not want to just run MailMan mailing lists and MHonArc list archives on my site. I could have done that without spending a dime on vBulletin...

This hack is definately a "thumbs up"...

I would use this feature to include our Email mailing lists with the web-based forums. It's also a very good way to archive email mailing lists and digestified formats.

We currently have two mediums and I'd like to integrate them both seamlessly. This is a perfect hack for that.

-- Mike

I, too, would be able to make great use of this. I actually have a user that has worked up his own script that will post to the forum although it's not easily expandable. Some type of integrated solution would be great!

Let us know if there's any progress on this . . .

I'm going to give this a shot during the school holidays (week after next), so watch out for a release in a few weeks