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

[techman41973]

Churchmedia, thanks for this tutorial website and your reply to my question.
It still seems from reading your tutorial that users must manually subscribe to each forum.
My users are too lazy to subscribe to each forum. I just want to be sure that I can manually subscribe both existing and new users either to all forums or even better selected forums.
Also is there an option for a daily digest? I am slightly concerned of floods of messages getting sent out. This still looks like a great feature and my appreciate to the people who developed this mod
Techman

[ChurchMedia]

There isn't a daily digest.

I've attached a screenshot from the usergroup settings. You can automatically assign forum subscriptions to groups when a member is assigned to a group. So if you want to subscribe your current members you will need to run an sql query. As far as a flood of emails, it really depends on if your server can handle it or not. I know if I subscribed all of my members there would be a revolt , but I think my server could handle it.

[techman41973]

yep, looks like it could work me.
thank you for your time

[rcwild]

Installation process seemed to go well, but I have two problems:

(1) When I select "Subscribe to this Forum" from the Forum Tools pull-down, I don't have the new instant notification option.

(2) Clicking on a post title now produces this error message:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_ENCAPSED_AND_WHITESPACE, expecting T_STRING or T_VARIABLE or T_NUM_STRING in /home/canyon/public_html/forums/showthread.php on line 943

[doubleclick]

Hey Churchmedia -

Great tutorial for your users. I like the way you got the users to clean up their own excess code/content/gibberish until cyricx codes this into the mod.

I was wondering if you are able to get more than one forum to work. A few of us are having difficulty with this, and it seems from your forum that you have more than one working. If so, did you do something special?

Thanks,
dc

[ChurchMedia]

Originally Posted by doubleclick

I was wondering if you are able to get more than one forum to work. A few of us are having difficulty with this, and it seems from your forum that you have more than one working. If so, did you do something special?

Thanks,
dc

I haven't had any problems getting more than one forum to work. I just set up each forum one at a time. It took quite a while, but once you get a "system" down it goes faster. First I created an email address for the forum (using c-panel on my server), then filled in all of the info required on the forum edit page for the email integration. I had to remind myself to click yes to "Enable Email Integration for this forum?"

I didn't do anything special. My best guess is that there may be some server problems with some users. I have a dedicated server and can do whatever I want to with it. I know some shared servers have limitations.

Best of luck!

[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.

Thanks again. This was money well spent for me.

Did you fixed it ?

[lionelng]

I've installed this lovely mod but i can't seem to be able to create thread or reply to a thread via email. I'm tried all the 6 different settings but doing without much luck. I'm sure i've got the settings right after having gone through all the posts for this mod. Any help offered will be deeply appreciated.

[lionelng]

Wondering how long more do i have to wait to get an answer?

[unitedpunjab]

I installed this MOD but m not able to under stand how to create mail box and which email address to use.

Can you explain it bit more in practical way.