WMail - a POP3/SMTP Webmailer for vBulletin

What is this?
---------------
WMail is a "webmail client" - a front end, like a mail tool installed locally on your PC, for using POP3/SMTP mailboxes.

In short:
WMail adds POP3/SMTP access to vBulletin.

A live demo can currentliy be found on my testing board here:
http://vbdev.area-42.net/wmail.php


Key features:

• The obvious: Getting mailbox content, reading mails from every POP3 mailbox and sending mails through any SMTP server (configurable in the user options)
• written from scratch, spezificially to be used with vBulletin 3.5.x - not a port of something
• fully phrased and templated down to the last bit
• Full multipart support for downloading (and sending) attachments
• When reading mail the mail text is parsed for BB-Codes, so you get the graphical smillies from the forum, text formatting and URLs automatically become clickable links
• When replying to, or forwarding, mail the text of the original mail is quoted, propper quotemarks are added and a quote-header is added (customizable via template)
• various options for admin and users to customize the webmail client
• Does NOT require any special modules to be compiled into your PHP installation (like the IMAP libraries)
  (for techies: this uses basic socket connections instead of special PHP function calls)
• Admin can override certain aspects of the user config (forcing to use a given mailserver, force using forum email address and such)
• Write your mails using vB's WYSIWYG editor
• buildin (yet simple) addressbook for your E-Mail contacts
• Read/Unread markings - unread mails are highlighted, options for "mark selected read", "mark all read" and "mark selected unread"
• custom hooks to make it easy to develop addons for it
• automatically adds links to the webmailer in "Quick Links" menu, navbar and UserCP. Usualy no template edits needed when using default ones (can be disabled for each link in admin options)

Planned features:

• Support for multiple config sets per user
  (and so multiple mailbox accounts that can be querried)
• Sort mails into folders
• User configurable filters (for automatically sorting mails into folders)
• Preview of mailtext in inbox view (bellow subject)
• Forward mails as PM / Forward PMs as mail
• Reply to threads and PMs by mail
• Give/Provide your members an own eMail adress and inbox on your forums!
  • Members can recieve and send mails as "username@forumdomain.tld" without the need for an own POP3 account anywhere
  • Admin only needs ONE "real" POP3 box as "catch all".

Installation
--------------

Level : EASY
Duration : a minute or so
Files to upload : yes (11)
Products to import : yes (1)
Templates to edit : usually none


ChangeLog
===========
1.00 - first final release

• Fixed some minor bugs
• Login details are no longer stored as plain text in the database (*see note bellow!)
• Added option to save login details in a cookie on the users local computer instead of storing them in the forum's database

* Note on storing the login details in the database:
The login details are only base64 encoded when stored in the database.
A more secure encryption would make no sense anyway, the login details must be decrypted to be passed to the POP3/SMTP server - one well placed line of additional code in the POP3 or SMTP class could save the decrypted info anywhere the admin likes.
This "encoding" is only meant to prevent login details to be read (in plaintext) when doing maintanance to the database and stepping over it.
For fully securing the login details the "Save in cookie" option has been added.

Known Issues:

• On some installations mass deletion of mails (via "Delete Selected" from the inbox view) does not delete all mails
• Sometimes you get "-4 mails in inbox" - reloading the page then shows the correct inbox again

Besides of those two issues, that do not really break the function of the webmailer, it seemed to run pretty stable so far - that's why I decided to release 1.00 without having them resolved.


(more changelog entries in the readme)

____________________
This vBulletin extension is FREE! Be welcome to download and use it.
However, if you feel like supporting further development any donation is appreciated :bunny:

[Hellcat]

Originally Posted by webgroup

any feature to add and admin pre-selected signature to all emails send by the system?

Like: Email send via or by FORUMNAME.TLD

Something like that could easiely be implemented....
Will put it on my ToDo

[sybarites]

Any info on the next update?

[Hellcat]

Originally Posted by sybarites

Any info on the next update?

I didn't much time for coding this week
But I have the next two

1.00 final is pretty near, should come within the next days.
I hope to find the cause for one or two remaining bugs, and like to implement the above mentioned option to store login details in a local cookie instead of the server and baybe some sort of (simple) encrytion of it.

Once that's done, I'll head straight to the new featues - already got some plans made up

[dreck]

Originally Posted by Hellcat

I didn't much time for coding this week
But I have the next two

1.00 final is pretty near, should come within the next days.
I hope to find the cause for one or two remaining bugs, and like to implement the above mentioned option to store login details in a local cookie instead of the server and baybe some sort of (simple) encrytion of it.

Once that's done, I'll head straight to the new featues - already got some plans made up

nice :up:

[sybarites]

What will 1.00 have?

[PtP]

Originally Posted by sybarites

What will 1.00 have?

Not much more we hope, the idea of a final is to be bugfree as possible, not to be a release with lots of new features.

[Hellcat]

Originally Posted by PtP

Not much more we hope, the idea of a final is to be bugfree as possible, not to be a release with lots of new features.

Yep!
You got the point!

1.00 will hopefully be pretty "clean" of bugs.

But like said a few posts above, I already got plans laid out for some of the bigger new features (mainly the "provide eMail address to forum users" thing) and I got quite some time to do the coding the next two weeks.
So, an update with new features will not take too long as well

I really want to get this going, it's my biggest mod for vB so far and I want it to become huge :bunny:

[kurtbarker]

hey mate, sorry if this has been covered, but I didn't wanna read 16 pages...

I loged in, and went to wmail.php and got a screen with no emails, so I clicked 'Get Mail' and they all appeared... that was strange... Am downloading an attachment and go back to the main wmail.php page, and am now getting this:
You have a total of -4 mails in your inbox,
that's 0 new mails since your last check.

and note, that with that above message, if I click 'Get Mail', or the link under that message to view the emails, there is nothing there

and i've done no changes since I last accessed, and can't seem to get my mail back

[kurtbarker]

ok, it's come back, but it's tempremental... as far as I know theres nothing wrong with the email server...

it is a possible bug?

[Hellcat]

I'm aware of that "-4" error - it's some kind of error/interuption during communication with the POP3 server.
I didn't find the exact cause for so far since - like you just saw - it comes and goes randomly....