Comments on: phpBB Mail Gateway

By: James

James — Tue, 12 Feb 2013 22:36:37 +0000

Success! I did all of the middleware in perl while learning a lot along the way. There are in-fact various ways to tie a Yahoo Group to your PHPBB3 forum. Absolutely abandon the old and nonexistent mail2forum. Dont give it another thought. I chose using the grabyahoogroup.pl which supersedes yahoo2maildir.pl. The scraper bypasses the need for email as well as multiple email accounts to separate the various groups. I modified it to save a duplicate of every new file into an IMPORT folder to work from, so I still always have the original messages. Then you can clean up the mail files with your own perl and regex magic and then run this importer against it. I will be throwing this up on a few forums immediately and probably any BB3 forum I do in the future. It can easily be a convenience to your niche in one-way or even two-way mode.
February 12, 2013.

By: James

James — Sun, 10 Feb 2013 04:08:58 +0000

For those looking at this, I have figured out the following:
- It does try to “thread” messages based on topic title which is really great when it works. I wish it would also try using (In-Reply-To:).
- You need to enable extension=php_mbstring.dll in php.ini.
- For emails out, it uses php mail function without all of the phpbb stuff, so you need to make sure your php.ini has mail configured correctly.
- It absolutely requires plaintext format messages (Content-Type: text/plain; charset=”ISO-8859-1″), it chokes heavily on messages that have been scraped using Yahoo2Mbox or any other scraping tool when they are (Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=”0-58645656-1287429990=:31883″). This makes it a pain to import an archive.
- It will not pull date from the message and uses the phpbb post date. Another pain when importing from an archive.
- Pop works
- Maildir import works and is a good option when you want speed and also when using a single yahoo account for multiple groups. You can use a pop tool to sort mail based on subject or other header info.

Things I still need to figure out:
- How to import mbox or maildir archive when it has multipart messages sprinkled in. I am wondering if there is a tool that will convert messages to plaintext and thereby fix the mess that would otherwise be left behind if you simply searched and replaced the Content-Type.
- Need to find a pop client/mail agent that can sort mail to folders that will run on Windows, php, perl… Or then resolve to use a different email for each group/froum.
- Come up with some code to clean up emails to remove any references to “groups.yahoo.com” and so forth.
- Come up with code to also remove the very common “[Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ”
- Resolve issue where maildir files are not being deleted. Prolly a server rights thing I havent figured out yet.

By: James

James — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 04:44:18 +0000

Elric, I just stumbled across your efforts here and am excited to give it a try. I was wondering two things.

First, can you or anyone else who may be using this share with me a url so I can see what the end result looks like?

Second, my goal is to sync a forum from a yahoo group, minimally one way/archival. I have used a program called yahoo2mbox that has slowly collected all of the history into an mbox file. With your list experience, can you give me some creative ideas on how I could get this data into a fresh phpbb install before I enable the mail gateway to continue the syncing from then on? I too am running IIS environment and am limited on what I might do to achieve this.

I wonder if the mail gateway could be easily modified to not pop, but instead check an mbox file for changes to process into a forum. Seems like a good solution to the yahoo groups dilemma: Mbox2Phpbb.

By: Jeff

Jeff — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 14:36:07 +0000

I am getting my emails from Gmail, who uses only SSL.
Thanks!

By: qurgh

qurgh — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 23:53:52 +0000

Ok, nevermind. I got it working by adding ssl:// to the front of the host name in pop3_collect.php. You can delete all my messages. Again, thanks for the great mod. It seems to be working!

By: qurgh

qurgh — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 23:05:57 +0000

Damn it! Sorry for the double post. The site said the first one was a duplicate and didn’t show it to me until I posted a second one… Feel free to delete one of them, since they ask the same thing (and feel free to delete this post too)

Thanks again for such a great mod!

By: qurgh

qurgh — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 23:04:21 +0000

Thanks for making this! I’ve been looking for something like this for ages!

Is there a way to get it to work with SSL POP3? I have to use a Google account as the mail receiver, but Google forces SSL.

Is there any chance of porting the function in pop3_collect.php to the built-in PHP IMAP functions? They support POP3 and SSL. If that’s not an option, could you explain exactly what output the function should give so I could take a stab at porting it myself?

By: qurgh

qurgh — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 23:01:16 +0000

Thank you for making this! I’ve been looking for something like this for ages!

Is there anyway to get this to work with SSL POP3? I’m trying to pop the mail from a Google POP3 account (the domain I’m working with has Google Hosted Apps).

I’ve looked in the pop3_collect.php and noticed you used raw sockets instead of the PHP IMAP functions which support SSL POP3. Is there a possibility of porting this function to the built-in IMAP functions, or could you describe exactly what information should be returned by that function so I could port it myself?

By: Elric

Elric — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 19:49:16 +0000

1) When someone posts a message with attachments the attachments are discarded. It would be nice to turn them into post attachments but my own requirements haven’t included that yet.
2) I don’t know what would happen if the guest account has no write access but I think the post will still take place.
I quite understand not wanting to try it on a live system but you could create a private test forum not visible to the public and test it there.
Good luck and thank for your support!

By: Mats

Mats — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 02:48:56 +0000

Aaahhh… the search is over! (I hope.) This is a mod I desperately need but realising it is still in v. 0.0.3 I have not (yet) been brave/foolish enough to test it on a production phpbb3 installation…
Two questions before I take the leap:
1) What happens if someone e-mails or posts an attachment? (Will your mod include or truncate the attachment during the conversion, or will it crash the system and cause havoc?)
2) What happens if “Create Users for Unrecognised Accounts” is disabled and Guest account has no write access? Is the mail left untouched or is it deleted? (I’m trying to avoid spam buildup on the forum and in the inbox.)
Thanks for developing this mod!