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Email Integration on self-hosted Vanilla?
nolageek
New
I see this fuction on vanillaforums.com:
http://www.vanillaforums.com/vfcom/features/email-integration
Will this be available for the self-hosted version as well?
http://www.vanillaforums.com/vfcom/features/email-integration
Will this be available for the self-hosted version as well?
0
Best Answer
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Todd Vanilla StaffWe don't have plans to release this feature because it requires a significant external infrastructure to support.0
Answers
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I have as an emergency a plugin that allows me or other contributor to post announcements on a wordpress blog via email. It only checks the inbox every half hour any more would be too much load to be worth it.
Why not use a mailing list service, with an archive in feed format, you can use the feed discussions plugin and adapt it. You could use the mailing list email as you support email.
One thing I have learnt over the years is to be smart with what you have. I use dropbox as CDN for the blog. All the media is transferred to dropbox automatically, the links overwritten. This is not quite the approach for forums, as that is the poster responsibility. But I make uploads to my site impossible, encourage the likes of dropbox, etc.
grep is your friend.
How much infrastructure are we talking about here? Is it something you would consider releasing unsupported, or is it something you want to keep to make your hosted plans more competitive (which is understandable)?
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grep is your friend.
@x00 I understand the value of being smart with what I have - but functionality like integrating a forum with a a mailing list has so far eluded me - I keep getting tons of email loops when I try to hack it in myself. So far only two other forum softwares (both either outdated or EOL'd) has this ability and I was excited to see vanillaforums.com had this (since Vanilla has everything else I'm looking for and looks great.)
Back to the drawing board.
i think you are missing the point if you can't pay $50 a month then you don't really need this infrastructure, becuase it is overkill.
of course you can get code that work but that is half the problem.
grep is your friend.
We're using google groups now but it's like herding cats trying to get them to join / manage subscriptions - plus, google groups has such limited features. (Like most google products - it's great but under developed.) phpBB has a plugin but it doesn't work on phpBB3 and it hasn't been update in ages. I guess listservs are out of vogue these days.
Ugh, don't get me started on yahoo groups.
Basically we're cc'ing 25 addresses (plus a few others) back and forth and it's a nightmare - people are getting left out of some messages and others forget to hit reply all. It was my idea to start a listserv or a google group but some of us are technically challenged and can't figure out Groups or they don't want to create a google/yahoo account. I figured we could start a forum and I chose (Vanilla as usual) but now I'm trying to figure out a way to get listserv functionality and I've been on a wild goose chase ever since trying different software, etc..
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My first challenge is to migrate all of existing user accounts and historical messages to Vanilla. I already have an email drop box set up that collect the ListServ messages, which I then parse into a database. I plan on exporting the data using Vanilla's existing Vanilla's Import/Export capabilities to achieve this. It appears to be doable, once I figure out the proper format for the Export.
I'll have to set the Exports up on a recurring bases. I'm already doing this with the drop box-to-database processing, and the same techniques should work with the export.
Our website already has SSO and subscription management for ListServ, and the ProxyConnect SSO module seems to bridge the gap between our site and Vanilla, so once the user accounts are ported, it should work nicely.
Once I get ListServ flowing into Vanilla, I then have to get Vanilla flowing back into ListServ. This is where things get challenging, since I don't want to create a message loop. ListServ is pretty good at detecting repeat messages, but I'm planning on building out my own thread repeat protection. I would really like to see how others handle this issue.
I do advise against going down the ListServ route, having been there for the past decade. It was the cat's meow back in the day, and it still absolutely the right tool under certain scenarios. But if your goal is to build a community, choose a solid open source web based platform.
I've used phpBB, BBpress, VBulletin, BuddyPress and several others, but from what I've seen so far, Vanilla has the best platform to work with from a developer perspective.
Now that I've gathered my thoughts, its time to dive back into that Import/Export DTD.
FudForum has built in mailing list integration so that may be something for the people in this discussion to consider. I also have the same need as everyone else here and am reseacrhing possibilities.
geez, I don't know if I should be glad to see that so many people have the same needs or be sad that there is no free-as-in-freedom software that solves this problem yet...
@dansmith : I never heard of FudForum before but the fact that they don't host their own support lists on FudForum and use Google Groups instead surely doesn't inspire confidence
@smaffulli what do you mean?
Vanilla self hosted is 100% free.
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Mailman 3.0 is in its second beta https://launchpad.net/mailman/+milestone/3.0.0b2 but it's missing a modern archiver.
More details about mailman 3
http://wiki.list.org/display/DEV/Mailman+3.0
@422 said:
I wrote free-as-in-freedom, referring to https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
as Todd specified above, the email integration of Vanilla.com is not available under the GNU GPLv2, therefore that feature is not free as in freedom.
Im not aware of any en masse email system that is free...
We use sendgrid and postmark
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smaffulli, I think my mailman vanilla integration, which I hosted on github, may solve your problem.
@Byrd
Thanks for contributing, but this thread is over 2 years old...