Post/Reply by Email - Integration With Email Lists

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Nicofuma
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Re: Post/Reply by Email - Integration With Email Lists

Post by Nicofuma »

But create a new topic and reply to a topic is defintely not the same thing: to reply to a topic we reply to an email sent by the BB, nothing else than writing the message to do.
But to create a new topic you have to define in which forum you want to post, how? with a special tag in the subject? (ie: [<forum_id>]) but to get the forum id you have to open your browser, navigate to the forum and look at the UR, at this point you can also clic on the "New topic" button and then send your new topic.
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Pony99CA
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Re: Post/Reply by Email - Integration With Email Lists

Post by Pony99CA »

I know that it's not exactly the same. It's still a mixed (inconsistent) user experience, though.

For example, you could theoretically have an E-mail server that would send a list of forums in response to a "help" request. Then you could use that list to create new topics.

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EXreaction
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Re: Post/Reply by Email - Integration With Email Lists

Post by EXreaction »

I also think this would be a great feature to have and would use it all the time...however someone with time to do this needs to volunteer to do it...

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Re: Post/Reply by Email - Integration With Email Lists

Post by NeilUK »

I may have read an erroneous post here but I did read that Wordpress also looked into this feature for new blog posts and comments but rejected it in the end because of security fears. Whether it was really insecure or whether it was just that their users would have security fears was unclear. Because the "perception" of insecurity would be almost as damaging as actual insecurity as it may stop people wanting to use Forums that have this enabled.

If it can be made secure though I think an extension would get some interest but like has been said not as a core feature in my view
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DavidIQ
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Re: Post/Reply by Email - Integration With Email Lists

Post by DavidIQ »

For an extension this would be pretty simplistic in that all you would need is a single file to get the job done, the one that would be called by a cron job or be called by the cron system used by phpBB. It would just retrieve the emails. How these are processed is where it gets tricky and insecure. Of course there would probably be an ACP module for configuring this.

Maybe this should be the next "official" extension? ;-)
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John P
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Re: Post/Reply by Email - Integration With Email Lists

Post by John P »

I would really like it to become the next "official" extension.

Someone was wondering people should know the forums but in most cases companies install the phpbb forum and tell the employees here it is, so use it!

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Re: Post/Reply by Email - Integration With Email Lists

Post by DGDanforth »

Oleg wrote:Accepting email replies as anonymous posts seems straightforward enough.

Accepting new topics via email can be technically implemented with not much more effort and it would still technically make sense, but it ought to be tricky to use. In mailing lists, there is one email address for the entire list. Boards have forums, therefore new topic emails must be sent to specific email addresses, there are multiple to choose from and keep in mind that they are not going to be localized like forum titles may be.

Allowing users to claim posts made from their email address seems (security-wise) innocuous enough. UI for this can rather easily be cumbersome.

Automatic assignment of emailed posts to users is getting into questionable territory.

Then there is the server configuration part, incoming email handling is not what I expect shared hosts to provide at all.

I don't really see this as a core feature.
My first post on this topic.
I am Chair of the BlackBoxFramework.org where 1/2 of the users want email interaction.
We are transitioning from LISTSERV Lite as the email list handler (because the developers
of BlackBox have moved on) to phpBB.

Suggestion
Outgoing: For each bulletin board specify ONE Target email to which all posts are sent (from all topics and forums).
In our case that Target would be our new LISTSERV Lite email. That server then broadcasts the post to its registered recipients.

Incoming: Designate the Target as Source so that an email received from Source with Subject: forum "/" topic is posted
to the appropriate forum and topic.

Best,
Doug Danforth

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Re: Post/Reply by Email - Integration With Email Lists

Post by DGDanforth »

If email consists of interaction with a SINGLE email server then encoding/decoding need only happen between phpBB and that single server. The email users of the server would never have to deal with that.

bb<---->email server <--->(multiple users)

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Re: Post/Reply by Email - Integration With Email Lists

Post by gordon_dye »

I have been an administrator of a mailing list plus a BBS for 10 years. Three years ago we upgraded our BBS and lost the ability to interact with our mailing list. We made a concerted effort to educate our community on using RSS. We have had around a 90 percent compliance in terms of people getting on board. But our postings have fallen off to nearly zero, in spite of a continued interest in the discussion topic. The BBS with RSS simply hasn't worked for us.

I don't mind insisting on people posting to the BBS and not using the mailing list in lieu of the BBS. But I very much would like the BBS to forward postings to the email list. I think that would get everyone back on board and participating.
gordon

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DavidIQ
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Re: Post/Reply by Email - Integration With Email Lists

Post by DavidIQ »

You could probably do that already through an available event but you'd have to take a look at what's available in the message notifications.
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