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

[Marv]

Any updates on a 4.x release ? Hell, this one is a must have

[hollosch]

Tagged and waiting for a solution of this mod for vB4...

[twohawks]

Does this mod work with 4.0?

Thanks!

[toivo]

Originally Posted by toivo

Here is a quick-fix of patches to EI Mod to support moderated forums, cloned from the existing code in EI Mod. The patch modifies emailintegration.php and two of its plugins, adds two custom hooks to moderate.php and installs a product with four plugins.

In limited testing under 3.8.4 this patch allowed moderation from the Admin Control Panel, Moderator Control Panel and from inline moderation.

The only differences to the earlier version tested in 3.6.8, available from https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...151222&page=67, are the two INSERT statements in the installation instructions in the file Install.384.txt.

Please note that the patch at https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?p=1980256 post #234 incorrectly adds the signature of the original author of the thread to moderated replies sent by email, instead of the signature of the poster of the reply.

As a workaround, you can remove the signature from the email template for replies. The users seem to have a signature in their emails in any case. I am using the old format - by popular demand.

[Serenit_y]

Originally Posted by beishe8

Sad to say but seems this hack should find its way to the graveyard.

After spending 100s of hours on it,
The man has life issues to deal with, in attempting to focus on he's life, all of a sudden, you wish to condemn the Time and effort spent on it, and countless Forum Administrators the mod has helped, and the sheer goodwill of the author of the Mod in giving the mod for free.

Shame.

[Serenit_y]

Good afternoon,

I've been having problems with the Mail Integration plug-in,

Problem
--------
- I create a forum, and apply the Email integration settings,
- Add a couple of users to automatically receive email notifications
- Create a new thread in the forum
- The notification of the new thread arrives to User A, and User B's email account immediately
- I reply the email from user A and user B's email accounts.
- I log into vbulletin, but the messages don't arrive, after about 10minutes, I run the "Email Integration" cron from the shcedule task Manager
- Nothing happens,
- Couple of hours later, I log back into the forum, and the messages arrive, after about 3/4 hours,
- Sometimes they arrive the next day.

- Also often after the messages arrive, they keep duplicating themselfs on the thread, like a loop, till I
delete the thread.

Please help, I'm on a deadline to solve this.

Much thanks in Advance,

[Serenit_y]

On further testing the problem is,
The Cron gets the topic/message from the email, but dosen't seem to delete it, so when it runs again, it copies that same email, and now I have many duplicated replies on my vbulletin server.
I've set the cron to run every 5 minutes,
If your available, i'd appreciate a hand : ]

[toivo]

If you use the old message format, here is my patch in the 3.6 forum that gets rid of duplicated messages:https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=953

By 'cron' do you mean the Scheduled Tasks in vBulletin? The Scheduled Tasks run only when the forum has some activity. You can run a PHP command line (CLI) script and schedule it to run every 5 minutes by using the real cron (crontab), or Windows Scheduler, depending on your operating system. The script is in this post: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost.php?p=1581411&postcount=898

If messages do not get deleted, have a look at this post: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=886

All these patches are used on vB 3.8.4 with two mailboxes.

[Serenit_y]

Originally Posted by toivo

Message for Toivo, deleted whole message to save space

Thanks for the reply, I just wanted to make sure we're on the same page
1. I've carried out the first task, Adding the patch to stop duplicated messages
2. Yes by Cron, I meant the Email Integration cron that retrieves the mail from the user accounts.
Following the link, I did the following
-- Created php file forum_read.php, under the vbulletin directory, and copied the code to this file.
I replaced the forum url variable, with the vbulletin URL, but where do you find the url requested below;

"// cron url from <img src=
$cron_url = 'http://example.com/testvb/cron.php?' "

3. I created a run_cron.php file, under vbulletin/include/cron directory, containing the script

#!/bin/bash
# load forum home page and read cron.php
php /root/forum_read/forum_read.php
exit 0'

- I added a new cron under AdminCP -> scheduled tasks pointing to this run_cron.php file.

- I'm I missing something so far?
- When I run this run_cron.php file from the scheduled task menu, will it run the forum_read.php file, or the EI file, this was a bit confusing.
- Also does the EI mod, only run when someone actually opens the forum,


Thanks a lot in advance,

[toivo]

where do you find the url requested below;
"// cron url from <img src=
$cron_url = 'http://example.com/testvb/cron.php?' "

example.com is the URL of your site, testvb is the name of the folder where your forum is.

- I added a new cron under AdminCP -> scheduled tasks pointing to this run_cron.php file.

The script cannot be run under vBulletin Scheduled Tasks. The purpose of the forum_read.php file is to read the home page of the forum once every 5 minutes so that the Scheduled Tasks are triggered to run even during low forum activity. The Scheduled Tasks in vBulletin are run only if the forum is accessed, and getting a cron (the cron in the operating system) job to run forum_read.php once every 5 minutes to access the forum guarantees that the Scheduled Tasks are run regularly, independent of the forum activity.

You may have to tweak the forum_read.php script to run it on the same server, I run it from a different server.

- Also does the EI mod, only run when someone actually opens the forum

That is true. The script forum_read.php makes sure that the forum is accessed every 5 minutes, independent of the actual user activity.