Post/Reply by Email - Integration With Email Lists

[DavidIQ]

As for the need, I've seen several people request such a feature on phpBB.com. Here's a search for topics containing "mailing list" or "listserv". The usual response is either that phpBB is a forum, not a mailing list, or that bulletin boards were designed to replace mailing lists.

Steve

Except for the 2 page "Mail Gateway" MOD topic, most of those look irrelevant to this discussion... May as well have looked for the keyword "email"

[diego898]

so it seems some are opposed and some are in favor. Some are regular users and some are developers, moders, etc. What happens now? Does it have to be unanimously received as a great idea in here to even be considered by the dev team as a whole or to get the implementation details more carefully thought out?

[Oleg]

Both release managers opined that this should not be a core feature. The remaining options are an officially-endorsed extension or an unofficial extension.

An unofficial extension is just like a modification in terms of ownership/responsibility (author can do whatever they want) but using the extension APIs rather than modifying phpbb code. If you want to go this route you can pretty much do whatever you want.

An official extension is something we do not yet have a precedent for, but the idea would be for official extensions to be supported by phpbb to some extent. If you want to go this route then I would suggest reviewing the points brought up by development/mod team members and writing a proposal that specifically addresses them. Security and a posting API in particular come to mind. An official extension would probably need to satisfy all requirements for core code but will be hosted in a separate repository, and obviously would need to be written as an extension.

[callumacrae]

If it's in the core it's in the core, but my feeling is it'll be as popular as the birthday feature in Olympus.

Heh.

If it's in the core, wouldn't that make it more prone to people searching for exploits/security holes than if it's a mod? I mean if it's something all phpbb forums have, people will go after it like flies to poop. But if it's a mod that only a few forums here and there use, the number of people looking for exploits falls dramatically, as does the damage if one is found.

More people looking for exploits is a good thing, not a bad thing.

[Pony99CA]

If it's in the core it's in the core, but my feeling is it'll be as popular as the birthday feature in Olympus.

Heh.

If it's in the core, wouldn't that make it more prone to people searching for exploits/security holes than if it's a mod? I mean if it's something all phpbb forums have, people will go after it like flies to poop. But if it's a mod that only a few forums here and there use, the number of people looking for exploits falls dramatically, as does the damage if one is found.

More people looking for exploits is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Only if they're white hat hackers and willing to report them.

Steve

[Pony99CA]

As for the need, I've seen several people request such a feature on phpBB.com. Here's a search for topics containing "mailing list" or "listserv". The usual response is either that phpBB is a forum, not a mailing list, or that bulletin boards were designed to replace mailing lists.

Except for the 2 page "Mail Gateway" MOD topic, most of those look irrelevant to this discussion...

What about these topics on the first page of results:

foum-mailing list bridge
Mail List Integration

I realized that most of the results weren't on-topic, but at least I tried to provide something to narrow things down.

May as well have looked for the keyword "email"

As I said, I tried to narrow things more than that and didn't think that "maililng list" and "listserv" would be that prevalent. Instead of rolling your eyes and making snide comments, maybe you could do something constructive, like provide a better search query instead.

Steve

[DavidIQ]

As I said, I tried to narrow things more than that and didn't think that "maililng list" and "listserv" would be that prevalent. Instead of rolling your eyes and making snide comments, maybe you could do something constructive, like provide a better search query instead.

Steve

You're the one trying to prove your point with missleading data, not me.

[diego898]

well thats it then :l

[Dog Cow]

I'm not too familiar with POP or other ways to access emails sent to a server, but in an ideal environment they could setup a pipe to a script we build (not sure how common that ability is however).

I don't know what you consider a "large number of users", but because this requires mailserver configuration, shared hosting users probably won't be able to use it. This is in my opinion way out of "a large number of users".

cPanel has an option to pipe incoming emails to a program instead of a mailbox. This program could be a Perl or PHP script.

Here is a link to the documentation: Email Forwarders in cPanel

Well, along the lines of a secret key, we could randomly generate a secret key for each user that they can access in their profile (or have a new one generated in case someone else discovers what theirs is).

Why not just let the user make up an email password for himself? Posting a new topic requires the password be in the subject or in the first line of the post. Sending an email with an incorrect password spawns a response from the server asking the email sender to either supply a valid password, or have the new posting rejected.

[Chaot_s]

I would like some feature like this too,

I have seen sites doing something simular for other things (helpdesk). they provide the user a hash in their profile. this hash is used to create a special email adres like helpdesk.<hash>@domain.tld. This could be used to provide every forum member a custom hash, which in turn can be used to send in a post.

This could be done via a catchall mailbox that phpbb3 checks via imap / pop3. the forum then could check for matching from / to pairs in the mailheaders. Is there a match? --> procces the mail as a post request. In addition to using the global domain catchall, a server admin with acces to the mailserver could set up a mailbox and make a catchall mailbox for only forum.*@domain.tld. In postfix this can be done useing the recipient_delimiter.


I would not like it if the forum would respond to un recognized / failed post requests. This would be very tricky with users that have set auto responders. the forum would be responding over and over again since there is no way to tell if the mail is somehow related to a previous response.

Greets,
Chaot_s