E-mail to Post

[jamiedolan]

HI;

Is there a way to setup or a modification that will allow users to post via e-mail. So for example, a section of the forum would have it's own address such as:

vB4GeneralDiscussion@vbulletin.org

Messages e-mailed to that, with a from address of a member would be posted, subject as the post title and the message as the body.

Then the responses would automatically get e-mailed to them. Also for subscribed thread, they user could simply reply to a message and have it be posted to the thread.

Does some setup similar to this exist?

Basically I'm talking about a VBulletin forum being able to act as an enhanced version of Yahoo groups.

Thanks

Jamie

[ISFCE]

I have been searching for something similar but even more limited in scope.

All that I am looking to do is take a number of messages from an active email List Serv and have them automatically be archived to a specific forum. No need to send back out from the forum.

I have been testing this using the Email Integration 2.6 plugin (Jamie - This may work well for what you need) but have been running into trouble. This plugin was designed for use on vB 3.x and earlier. However, I am presently running the newest vB 4.x and been noticing some issues with the integration and menu changes.

I would love any suggestions. Thanks in advance!

-Christian

[jamiedolan]

Originally Posted by ISFCE

(Jamie - This may work well for what you need) but have been running into trouble. This plugin was designed for use on vB 3.x and earlier. However, I am presently running the newest vB 4.x and been noticing some issues with the integration and menu changes.

Thanks. It does sound like that might work for our site. We are also on the latest version of VB, so it would be good if there was an up to date version of this plugin.

[Videx]

The biggest problem is that once people got used to this sort of thing they would never visit your site. You could be churning out tons of emails but your traffic would be down.

And lots of emails isn't a good thing these days. Even if you have a dedicated server there are fairly strict email limits to avoid spam. As soon as anyone marks an email "spam" then boom - all your emails to that domain go into spam filters.

Finally there's a new belief that younger users don't use email at all.

[jamiedolan]

Originally Posted by Videx

The biggest problem is that once people got used to this sort of thing they would never visit your site. You could be churning out tons of emails but your traffic would be down.

And lots of emails isn't a good thing these days. Even if you have a dedicated server there are fairly strict email limits to avoid spam. As soon as anyone marks an email "spam" then boom - all your emails to that domain go into spam filters.

Finally there's a new belief that younger users don't use email at all.

If your running the listsrv, you always have the potential to include ads in the footer of messages.

The feedback I've heard from people, including those that currently run lists is that they are not interested in forums. They like the simplicity of e-mail and don't care to deal with anything else. If you don't do the e-mail list service, I doubt many of these people would have been converted to forum users anyway. If you do maintain a mailing list and import it into your forum, then at least you have these people generating searchable content for your site.

I do get the distinct feeling that it is primarily an older generation that is using the mailing lists and younger users are much more inclined to make use of forums.

[ISFCE]

Originally Posted by jamiedolan

Thanks. It does sound like that might work for our site. We are also on the latest version of VB, so it would be good if there was an up to date version of this plugin.

Agreed about having a more up to date version. However, it appears that the developer may have been content with his product and abandoned further development. I do believe that this could be made to work for newer vB releases with some tweaking.

Originally Posted by Videx

The biggest problem is that once people got used to this sort of thing they would never visit your site. You could be churning out tons of emails but your traffic would be down.

And lots of emails isn't a good thing these days. Even if you have a dedicated server there are fairly strict email limits to avoid spam. As soon as anyone marks an email "spam" then boom - all your emails to that domain go into spam filters.

Finally there's a new belief that younger users don't use email at all.

I completely understand what you are getting at. However, our active user base has grown accustomed to our List Serv for many years now and are not interested in losing it in lieu of a forum. Furthermore, there is no worry of losing traffic to the site if something like this were implemented.

These are primarily older (35-60 year old) individuals so this does play into what you mentioned.

As previously stated, I am only looking to have messages from this email list be collected within the forum for archival and searching means. I would imagine that this is entirely possible but have yet to find anyone who has made this work.

Thank you both your input!