Forums v Email Discussion lists, a suggestion

Another forum

http://www.sitescape.com/forum.html

but don't worry vbulletin, don't think many will convert. It is different and "slightly" more expensive.

Anyway.. why posting?

This is the feature i liked the look of:

Users can email to a designated address, whereupon Forum will post it in the appropriate forum as a new entry.

what do you think?

lots of people out there like using email discussion lists. Personally i hate em but i think it would be possible to turn vbulletin into the ability to have both.

How does it work?

Well people subscribe to a discussion list. This is in fact a forum of your forum.

Say forum name is book talk

When someone posts a thread or a post then everyone who email subscribes to the forum gets an email with the message. Can set it up to do an email for every post, an email once a day or an email say at 25 posts (like egroups).

People can also send posts by email. To do this they send email:

forumname@yourdomain.com

now if the subject is say "Re I like Grisham"
then this post will get added to the thread "I like Grisham"

see what i mean?

This way the forum acts as BOTH a web based forum and an email one. I would love that it would be brilliant. I can think of a few egroups lists that would then convert over to my forum brining in massive traffic and massive member base.

I think the hardest bit is going to be error checking the email addresses (only from subscribed users) and making it easy for a reply to a post so that the post gets put in the forum in the correct place.

I would love to hear suggestions on this. I might install the software i just found (has a free trial) to see how it works. What do you think? I really hope someone is interested in this enough to think about making it. I would love to but please complete ignorance

You just send back an email to the user stating that the thread he/she has replied to has been deleted and/or closed depending on the situation.

PHP actually has an IMAP, &c module that would make it possible to do mail and news interfaces without too much work (for James and John, that is!).

a pop account would be enough.

now, the main issue here is - mail goes to pop account, but vB would not catch it at the same time. You would need a cron job to periodically check the pop account. However, that could mean that i email the list, someone posts in the meantime on the board itself, the email gets placed before the post.

What is missing is a way that every new mail goes directly to a script, which I have no idea how to do.

If that could be resolved, then this would be a easy to do hack.

The issue of new post or reply is easy - you would have the threadid in the subject line all the time.

This "thread id" in the subject line only works if you send out individual emails. This is not going to work for most boards.

A lot of egroups sites that i am intersted in have traffic of about 75 - 200 posts per day. Some of the lesser ones more around 25. No one wants 200 posts per day in their email box. They want maybe 4 emails with 25 posts.

Lots of these users are used to just hitting reply and sending a message, as there is no threaded strucuture they just make the title up as they go along.

If we do this batch mailing of say 25 emails (i think essential) then this is something that will have to change to keep the email structure. Personally i would want each post to have an email link by it as i think chris suggested with say popaccount34343@domain.com (with 34343 being the thread id). The subject title would then be the subject title of a post like you can do on the forum.

For new threads they would have to write the exact words new thead - Title in the subject line. This is to prevent getting hundreds of new threads from people just hitting reply. Either that or a new thread has to be sent to a different email box.

This is why 1 pop3 account will not work, need to be able to accept lots of different incoming email address, 1 for each thread.

Interested to here what john (via james ) thinks would be a good way to do this and what he actually thinks of the idea in the first place.

the pop mail still remains the problem, and most hosts don;t give unlimited pop3's.

You could always put the threadid tag at say the end of the message with a ---DO NOT MODIFY---

most accounts get unlimited email forwarding though into a pop3 account. That would be enough wouldn't it?

The thread343@domain.com really does sound like the best way to go.

I do think most of us have a catch-all account where as (anything)@ourdomain.com will go to our main pop3 account.

AH, right, forgot about the catchall. I guess most will have it.

I'm looking at some scripts written by people for Mailing List admin and seeing if I can convert one of them into this.

How would incoming spam be managed?

On a slightly different tangent, how well does vBulletin resolve for wireless Palm and Visor handhelds?

It might be interesting to experiment with an arrangement where someone using a synced handheld could subscribe to a specific forum and load up threads and posts, go about their day, respond on the PDA and transmit their responses next time they sync.

we could always WAP vBulletin!