Email to update Forums

[zakyn]

Hi,

I am hoping someone makes a mod that allows you to update the forums via email.

The logic is that

Admin ---> Emails to a preset email address ----> Creates a new post/topic under preset forum

As for all the issues of spam and such, I can see it being an issue, however I think that there are defintely some great uses for this mod.

Appreciate if anybody out there has any ideas.

Cheers

[Thantos]

A couple points to consider:

  Is the mail server the same as the web server?  Or do you have to connect to another server to retrieve the email?
  You would not want to do this on every page load.  Maybe something akin to the forum maintenance where it does it every so often.
  A cron job might be a better option
  To avoid the possiblity of spam attacks you should use a key to encrypt the email and then unencrypt all emails to that address.
  What scheme would the email need to be in to parse out the data?

[zakyn]

A couple points to consider:

  Is the mail server the same as the web server?  Or do you have to connect to another server to retrieve the email?
  You would not want to do this on every page load.  Maybe something akin to the forum maintenance where it does it every so often.
  A cron job might be a better option
  To avoid the possiblity of spam attacks you should use a key to encrypt the email and then unencrypt all emails to that address.
  What scheme would the email need to be in to parse out the data?

Thanks for your feedback. I do not see an issue whether the mail server needs to be the same with the webserver or not.

Email Client (Outlook, Eudora, Thunderbird etc) ---> emails to a specificed email -----> grabbed by Forum ----> Outputs to New Post

Truth be told, it sounds more complicated than ever, however I know it works for things like blogs and such whereby you can update a blog by sms/email and such and that doesn't really bother too much on what mail server you are on.

cheers

[[Unknown]]

Blogs don't have boards.  Blogs don't have many users... (not really.)

Blogs are a simplified example.

-[Unknown]

[Thantos]

It matters if the webserver is the same machine as the mail server mainly due to some considerations you must take into account.
Having different machines means:
Longer execution time due to having to connect and transfer speed issues.
What do you do if the mail server is unreachable?

It doesn't make it impossible but it must be taken into account.  Personally I would do this as a cron job.  That way I don't have to wait for a user to execute the script and it won't increase anyone's load time while it executes.

[zakyn]

Well, if as a cronjob; will it be a direct injection into the SQL DB?

I'm curious as to how the script will work/function.

[Thantos]

Well with a cron job I would expect to see a direct injection yes.  Unless of course you have a PHP commmand line interptor and SMF works with it (Which I don't know if it does or not)

[zakyn]

Thanks for the feedback, now to find someone who can code it