hi,

Emails have been one great tool in hand this days. Most of the people do check there mails frequently. Thus is it possible to have a email2Forum kind of thing where members can directly post topics or reply the topics using email. If not then can we have mailing list like yahoo groups etc so that members can post there via mails.

Furhtermore how far is it good to keep both Forums and mailing list together. Do you think it would hamper or reduce the no of visitors as people would just preffer to mail out things rather than visiting the site.

Hi,


i am currently starting to work in the port of my Module CM2F for phpbb to the newbb module.
If you don´t have heard about it before, CM2F is an application that integrates Mailinglists and forums.
I have been working in the last months to take my version from a beta phase into full production version, which should be reached very soon.
In the meanwhile i have started the project xoopscm2f to move my application to newbb. I am about as well to test the mod with the phpbb port of bbpixel. I think that it should work but without testing i am not sure.
CM2F is located at http://www.digitalgraal.dyndns.org.

and XoopsCM2F can be found in the dev forge.

great danyblue,

Will surely give it a try. but i am still confused about its impact on site. I dont want to lose visitors, moreover the other issue is how are the topics and subtopics will be managed in cm2f. is it based on the subject of mail ??

Like if subject is followed by RE: than the mail will be posted into the exisiting topic else it would be posted as new topic...

Can you give a brief description about how it works. And what all are the issues in hand as of now.

*~EDIT
Visited
http://dev.xoops.org/modules/xfmod/project/?xoopscm2f

No files to download as of now... Is there any demo setup ??

hi,

the reason for having no files existing yet, is that i am at this moment porting the code developped for phpbb to newbb.
There are some major changes that need to be done and working is progressing slow, since i am at the same time finishing the last Beta version of CM2F for Phpbb and Pnphpbb.

Basically the concept behind cm2f is the following:
- Each mail have a message-id embedded in its header, and each time some one makes a reply or forward, this message id is transferred to the new mail. This allows for CM2F to track down messages in one thread.
Sometimes, some users just copy the body into a new system and using the same message title resend the message. This could potentially make the system loose the message, but to avoid this, Cm2F is configured to if not detecting a valid message-id, to try to detect the message, first taking in account of the existence of a "re:" or "fw:" ( or any other tags to a maximum of 6).
If aftewards no message is still found in the database, then the system will assume that the message belongs to a new thread.
- One a message is detected as belonging to a thread, then the system will simply move it to the forum database, under the actual thread.

In order to implement those functions, CM2F apports several ways of processing the messages, or directly from mailboxes, or directly from the sendmail daemon, from files, from mailinglists archives, etc...

It can be ran, or fully controlled by the site administrator, or in fully automated way, where by default it will managed messages as configured in the data structure that configures it operations performance.(in the middle there are other running modes).


The other functionality behing Cm2F is to move messages from the forum to the mailinglists, being able to keep track of it, and being able to reconduct replies directly to the originating forum.


- the final mode, and the main one behind my port to XOOPS (i tried with postnuke, but i didn't like to much) is the connection of Cm2F to the news and articles system, this, to have the system processing the first message in each thread as an article, and all the following one as comments to the article. The messages will all be saved in the forum.


These are the mains functions supported(to be supported News/Articles) with my mode.


Regards,

Danyblue

How do you diffine 'application'?
Is it a deamon running on the server, is it a php script we need to set up with Cron?
If deamon, what OS will it run on?

Also, I can imagine a lot of sites where the admin won't have access to Cron/running deamons - can this 'application' be run from a remote server and act as a 'gateway' between the email server and the XOOPS server?

Hi,

well actually it can be ran a several ways.


-manually as a script, each time the user want, it can force the system to process the messages
- Virtual cron, based on the autorefresh of web pages, the processing script is ran on a predefine scheduled, 5, 10, 15, 30, etc minutes.
- Sendmail integration, each time an email is received by the sendmail daemon, the processing script is called.
- Cron, using the cron to ran the script based on defined scheduled.

All these runmode are working. Screen shots, as well as some history of the application can be found at :
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=131009&highlight=danyblue

Danyblue, would it be possible to use this module on shared hosting machines :?

Absolutely, the reason behind so much runmodes and inputs definitions was to have an application that didn´t need admin access to a server.

Anyone with a unique mailbox, some webspace free is able to ran Cm2F. At this moment with phpbb and pnphpbb. But once my port is complete with XOOPS and Newbb.

Cm2F is designed to be able to concentrate all the incoming messages in one just mailbox, being able then to detect the mailinglist that origined the message, because most of the users that talked to me, only had one.

The virtualcron function based on the autorefresh of browsers was built for the same reason.


Regards,

Danyblue

hi danyblue,

any update in this regard, awaiting to see you work and waiting to test it out.

dannyblue, any progress?