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

[mrahul]

does this work on 3.6.4 ?

[Cyricx]

Doubleclick - Do you have a separate email address for each? Each forum has to have it's OWN email address.

Mrahul - Yes


All - I'm going to move on with the code, I don't have vbmail working yet from the cron job, but I'm going to move forward with my next release and see if I can get the vbmail in crons working for a future release. Global variables do not work well in a function when ran from an automated cron job.

[kube]

Originally Posted by ChurchMedia

Man, you ROCK!! This is up and running on my board and almost everything is working perfectly. The only bug I've seen is that is this:

>> Create a new thread by email
>> Put a smilie in it
>> The smilie shows up fine in the forum
>> When you get the email back the smilie is a broken link

<img src="images/smilies/smile.gif" border="0" alt="" title="Smilie" class="inlineimg" />

The http://www.yoursite.com/forums/ is missing. This seems to only be on new threads. Replies are fine.

I`ve the same problem - anyone who knows how to fix it ?


Just testing at the moment - but seems to be the best hack i`ve installed....

thanks for that !

[doubleclick]

Originally Posted by doubleclick

Doubleclick - Do you have a separate email address for each? Each forum has to have it's OWN email address.

yes.

====


Also a suggestion while you're working on the code:

The emails that go out have an "unsubscribe" option, as it should. I'd like to see a link that allows them to change their notification options: 1x day, 1x week, as it is already setup in vbulletin. That gives more options than the yes/no one now available.

Dale

[Crys]

Hi there,

I managed to get new threads to open using e-mail but how does the reply part work? I've been testing with multiple test users and I still haven't received any e-mails from the forum e-mail I set up. Can you help me on this please?

Many thanks!

~ Crys ^^

[kube]

Originally Posted by Crys

Hi there,

I managed to get new threads to open using e-mail but how does the reply part work? I've been testing with multiple test users and I still haven't received any e-mails from the forum e-mail I set up. Can you help me on this please?

Many thanks!

~ Crys ^^

Did you subcribe to that forum ?

[Crys]

Yes, I tried to subscribe to the forum but the reply e-mail that it provides shows the main forum e-mail and not the forum specific e-mail. I also tried replying to that e-mail, just in case, but it never showed up, as a reply, in that specific thread.

~ Crys ^^

[MikeH2911]

Originally Posted by Cyricx

All - I'm going to move on with the code, I don't have vbmail working yet from the cron job, but I'm going to move forward with my next release and see if I can get the vbmail in crons working for a future release. Global variables do not work well in a function when ran from an automated cron job.

Is the vbmail the thing thats making gmail dump html in posts received from the forum?

Mike

[Reeve of shinra]

I'm amazed the mod was so easy to install -- in the past, whenever I saw a email to forum type mod it required a bazillion file edits to get working so major kudos there!

I am running into the follow error however when i try to run the cron job and test this out. I assume this is an error with my imap config, yes?

Fatal error: Call to undefined function: imap_open() in /home/social/domains/socialartist.com/public_html/forum/includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 111

Thanks!

edit: Nevermind, found the answer here:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=356

[MikeH2911]

A little help, the hack is installed and working just fine, but only in one forum. The test forum I created to see if this hack works (a hidden section of the forums), in the actual forum I want it to work in nothing happens despite all the settings and permissions being identical.

Any idea why?

Mike