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

[Cyricx]

In the admincp under Email Integration.

Most common errors:

Hostname: try the IP, localhost, or mail.yourdomain.com
username: try just the username or username@yourdomain.com
password: case sensitive

[Joshva]

Hi Cyricx,

Thanks for the prompt reply.


I finally found the script:

http://www.joshandfriends.com.au/for...gs.php?do=test

I ran it with my settings for the forum. It returned exactly the parameters i am using!

I tried setting up a mailbox in Outlook with the same parameters and it correctly retrieved the emails.

I have re-tried to reply via email integration and run the cron job manually from the Scheduled Tasks.


Any other ideas as to why it is not bringing back emails?

[Cyricx]

I'd have to see your forum manager settings to confirm what's wrong.

Perhaps the mailbox name is changed from INBOX to something else?

[popmyzit]

Hello again,

I still have errors even though I set GMAIL to POP3 and IMAP enabled:

Email Integration

Warning: imap_open() [function.imap-open]: Couldn't open stream {pop.gmail.com:995/pop3/ssl/novalidate-cert}INBOX in [path]/includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 98

Failed to connect to the mailbox for forum - X Forum

Warning: imap_open() [function.imap-open]: Couldn't open stream {pop.gmail.com:995/pop3/ssl/novalidate-cert}INBOX in [path]/includes/cron/emailintegration.php on line 98

Failed to connect to the mailbox for forum - X Forum

Done

---------

Can we not use GMAIL with this integration as you mention?
thanks

[popmyzit]

I read up on this, others are having similar problems with gmail can you please test this with php 5.25?

Do i need port 995 open from my end? I seem to have IMAP functions installed.

[StephenKay]

This mod looks very interesting, but I have a question:

Does this do any checking to verify someone posting a new thread or reply is a verified member? Or can any spammer who gets a hold of one of the thread email addresses post into it?

Thanks,
Stephen

[Cyricx]

Originally Posted by popmyzit

I read up on this, others are having similar problems with gmail can you please test this with php 5.25?

Do i need port 995 open from my end? I seem to have IMAP functions installed.

The problem, from all of my testing (running 5.26 on my server) relies with the settings in gmail. I've been able to duplicate no issues with setting up gmail per the second post

Originally Posted by StephenKay

This mod looks very interesting, but I have a question:

Does this do any checking to verify someone posting a new thread or reply is a verified member? Or can any spammer who gets a hold of one of the thread email addresses post into it?

Thanks,
Stephen

It has two different ways it verifies who you are. 1) It directly checks the email address the email is sent from to the email of a registered user to determine who the user is. Or you can turn on "strict" email checking, it which it rebuilds the email address using the username of the email address the email is sent from with the domain the email is sent from.

[popmyzit]

Hello,
actually it does work now the port 995 of the server has to be open in order to do IMAP/POP SSL secure transfers.

just wanted to let you know.

thanks again will test more.

[BustaCap]

I am trying to "mirror" a mailing list that I belong to to my vbulletin forum but am having some issues.

None of the users on the mailing list are users on my forum (and I want to keep it that way). I simply want a way to collect all of the messages on the mailing list and have them posted to my forum so I can easily read and search them. Is this possible? The problem I ran into is this:

1. I have a Gmail account that the mailing list messages go to. I setup EI to connect to that Gmail account so that messages are archived after downloading
2. The first time I ran the cron job it gave me an error saying no users with the gmail account that I use could be found. So I changed my email address on my forum to the gmail account. Then, when I ran the cron job all of the messages in the gmail account are removed from the inbox and archived. So far so good. But, when I then go to my forum none of the messages show up there.
3. To troubleshoot, if I send an email to myself using the gmail account, that message is correctly posted to the forum.

So it looks like it is ignoring any message that do not originate from my gmail account. Is this how it is supposed to work or do I have I have an icorrect setting somewhere?

More distressing is that I received error emails to my admin forum email address *from* the listserv saying "Your message dated Fri, 08 Aug 2008 20:03:54 -0600 with subject "Error:Invalid User Email" has been submitted to the moderator of the listserv". How does EI even know what the listserv email address is?? I really don't want *any* messages going to the listserv.

[kevinh]

Originally Posted by BustaCap

So it looks like it is ignoring any message that do not originate from my gmail account. Is this how it is supposed to work or do I have I have an icorrect setting somewhere?

That's how it's supposed to work, otherwise anyone could post to your forum if they know the EI mailbox address.