Starting a discussion or replying by mail

Lucas

That would be pretty awesome.

Aesahaettr

Awesome idea!

19eighties I totally agree. That would be incredible for people who don't want to open another account and join another network.

Allow users to subscribe email addresses to discussion topics. People would get new posts via email and couple reply via email and it would post to the message board all without the need for an account.
Users could always create an account with that email address if they wanted to manage the posts they've made via email previously.

This could be so awesome and powerful. Seriously, someone has to make this.

19eighties

Aesahaettr Interesting, so say someone forwards an email of a post and then someone random could reply back? It might be a little awkward since they would need to figure out the proper address to send the message back, etc.

Aesahaettr

19eighties There could be several ways it could work, which would probably have to be configured in admin options.

19eighties

Well, I think at least if I get an email notification, it would be handy as a member to be able to just reply by email and then the server would use a unique identifier in the message to add it to the appropriate conversation. (I think discourse has this feature.)

malayladu

19eighties Yes, this would be helpful. One don't need to come to forum to just reply 🙂

malayladu

NumOpen This is very powerful thing if we will have in Flarum.

NumOpen

This functionnality exists in Wordpress, you can make a post by mail. And you can make bridges with Twitter and Diaspora too.

dudheit

Good idea! I'd like to contribute to implement such a thing. What needs to done? My very first idea:

settings page where user can set an IMAP mail account
function which checks IMAP for new mails and does the processing:
- content extraction (message body, senders, receivers, attachments etc)
- decode topic/tags from mail subject (existing/new topic)
- prove permissions to post to the topic by sender email/hash
- process an flarum API call to create/update post
setup some cron job to fire the processing function every minute

Anything else (email notification etc) is already implemented right? So we get mailing list functionality from it this way?

Questions:

could this be done in a flarum plugin?
how to ensure security? how to ensure reliability?

I have not much experiments with the Flarum extensions and API, so I would be glad if someone would like to join the development (e.g. creating an "empty" flarum extension to which I can contribute some of the functions proposed above.

luceos

dudheit join the chat on gitter, we will answer questions as fast as possible.

dudheit

luceos Thanks, see you on gitter

cebollero

Is there no problem with sending so many emails?
I always try not to send too many emails, for I fear to be classified as a spammer. I have enough problems with important password recovery emails in the hotmail junk boxes...
May be I'm too cautious: how would you configure the email server? Will postfix do? With what config? Or is there a better solution?

dudheit

cebollero That is another topic I guess. This feature is about receiving mails send by users to process them as a forum post. Or am I wrong?

jakweb

I hope not. Email systems are old and rubbish, sending too many emails will get you black listed in no time.

suchwow

Hello,

+1 for this feature (being able to post, reply, etc.) by email.

As for implementation details:

users should have to register via the web interface prior being able to post to the forum ;
tags could be parsed from the subject of the email ("Super new topic #tag1 #tag2") ;
a visual indicator should appear on messages sent by email ;
a option should be added to allow to "reply by email" (a simple: mailto:threadid@specificsubdomain.domain.com&subject=foobar or something in the like).

meetdilip

ElkArte has post by email feature built in

ron_jeremy

meetdilip I believe Discourse does, too, but only for registered forum users.

Frink

Any updates on this?
@dudheit did you figure anything out? I have almost no clue with html, php, or css coding, but I would be willing to test it and report issues back to you...

dudheit

Frink Thanks for following up. I was waiting for Flarum's API to become stable. Unfortunately, however, over the months I lost track of the project and moved on to other solutions (discourse). Yet, I hope someone else will uptake the idea to implement an email API once Flarum hits version 1.0!

Fla

... therefore flarum is not required. Publish email addresses, write and add to each other's correspondence? Very interesting ?

Frink

dudheit
Thanks!