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

[fxs158]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

Not any way that I know how. At least not without having access to your outgoing mailserver and password.

Even for example, yahoo, when I set it up to look like I'm sending email from cyricx(at)mmogcommunities(dot)com when someone reads my emails, it'll show as coming from that address, and reply to will be to that address.

While that email address is actually a forwarder that forwards email to my yahoo account.

When I send an email to the site to be processed as a post, it sees my yahoo address. It ignores all the reply to and sending as junk. Goes straight to the guts

So how is the email authenticated?

[Cyricx]

Like so

// this grabs an overview of all the messages in the mailbox and creates an array we can read
  $letters = imap_fetch_overview($mailbox,"1:$amountmessages",0);
 
//then later in the cron file it checks the array we made above and determines the sender and host to determine the email address.
   $fromaddress = $letter->sender[0]->mailbox ."@".$letter->sender[0]->host;
 
// then later it does this query to find a user that has that email address
   $userinfo = $vbulletin->db->query_first("
    SELECT user.*, usertextfield.*
    FROM " . TABLE_PREFIX . "user AS user
    LEFT JOIN " . TABLE_PREFIX . "usertextfield AS usertextfield ON (usertextfield.userid = user.userid)
    WHERE email = '".addslashes(htmlspecialchars($fromaddress))."'
   ");
 
// finally in the cron file it does this which is where if there is not a user found in the above query, it sends the person an error message.
 
   // If Email Address belongs to a user
   if (!$userid)
   {
    $userinfo['username'] = "Unregistered User";
      $userinfo['languageid'] = 0;
    eval(fetch_email_phrases('ei_error_nouser', $userinfo['languageid']));
    vbmail($fromaddress, $subject, $message);
    imap_delete($mailbox,$msgno);
    continue;
   }

You guys are killin me here

I think I've mentioned this a few times in this thread how it determines the user that is posting

[Tralala]

Cyricx, just wanted to give you a hearty pat on the back... your hack is looking most excellent and the support you're providing in this community is very much appreciated.

[cynthetiq]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

Actually... wait, if I understand the description of regex correctly, I'm doing that already...

it's using preg_match and preg_replace, which I do.

Exactly what does m2f do to match a user to an email? (don't have time to dig through all their code and decode it all to figure it out )

I wanted to have a guest post, such as someone who wanted to join the guild I have a form that generates an email. So the only registered user is the replying people. The original post is a guest. But m2f has a filtering system that allows one to regex out things like valium, XXX. Those emails to the forum do not get posted and are either moderated in a queue or ignored.

[Cyricx]

Perhaps using this hack to create that first post would be better?

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...highlight=form

Then you would be able to take your existing form, send an email to someone if you needed and also have it create the new thread in the forum in question, which you could then utilize my hack to reply to

Hypothetically speaking of course

O and as far as the regex filter, basically your saying that M2F lets you setup that if XXX is in the email address, it has to be moderated?

[cynthetiq]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

Perhaps using this hack to create that first post would be better?

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...highlight=form

Then you would be able to take your existing form, send an email to someone if you needed and also have it create the new thread in the forum in question, which you could then utilize my hack to reply to

Hypothetically speaking of course

O and as far as the regex filter, basically your saying that M2F lets you setup that if XXX is in the email address, it has to be moderated?

I did see that hack and I added it to my list to investigate as well. I'm currently running m2f on a phpbb forum. I really hate phpbb since I had to add like 90 mods to get it close to teh same functions that vb has out of the box.

anyways, I was hoping for one mod, but I'll go for two.

Yes it does do two kinds of regex things, one to strip out and/or replace things like the yahoo/AOL mail signature, and also block spam.

[Cyricx]

Ah, yes what they do with their "regex" stuff I do alot of. I hadn't figured out how to get the yahoo and aol stuff out of the sig, but I'll check that out.

This mod definately blocks spam like M2F does from how you've described the features to me

I'll check out M2Fs pregs and see if it'll help spur ideas on how I can do that in my code

Thanks!!

[cynthetiq]

sure, thanks. I'll let you know how it compares.

It is already set to block the following:

Block emails with "failure notice" in Subject
Block emails with "Undelivered Mail Returned to Sender" in Subject
Block emails with "Autoreply" in Subject
Block emails with "Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender" in Subject
Block emails with "Your email requires verification" in Subject

[Cyricx]

O awesome.

Those are easy to code. I'll add those to the error codes for the next version I fire out

Thanks!!!!

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by Tralala

Cyricx, just wanted to give you a hearty pat on the back... your hack is looking most excellent and the support you're providing in this community is very much appreciated.

Thanks bro!