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Can you post via email with Gossamer Forum?

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Can you post via email with Gossamer Forum?
  
What I am looking to do is combine a email listsevr that the group I am in is used to using, with GForum for saving messages and have the search abilities.

I am a member of a group that shares lots of data and information, and the listsevr program they use doesn't have the best search features, so what I would like to do is have it so that everytime someone posts to the group it will post to Gforum. That will allow us to save all posts, and be able to search through them as needed.

The members of this email listserv is not up for a lot of changes, that is why I am looking to go this route instead of replacing the program. Can anyone tell me if GForum can be posted to via email? Can I set up a rule in Outlook so that anytime I get an email for the group it would post it to the forum?

If this will work, how much trouble will it be? If it won't work, does anyone have any ideas on how to handle this situation?

Thanks for any help on this!

Jamie

Last edited by:

ubu: Jun 1, 2004, 2:19 PM
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Re: [ubu] Can you post via email with Gossamer Forum? In reply to
I believe there is a plugin that does this. Check in the plugin download from your admin panel. I haven't used it so I don't really know how it works I only downloaded it a couple days ago.

CCUnet
my Christian web
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Re: [ccunet] Can you post via email with Gossamer Forum? In reply to
Can someone check this for me. I have not bought GForum yet, but will if it will work for my purposes.


Jamie
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Re: [ubu] Can you post via email with Gossamer Forum? In reply to
Jamie,
Here are the setup instructions for the plugin maybe this wiil help.\
Code:
Mail gateway configuration:

The following instructions are for the configuration of a system using Unix/Linux and sendmail.
  • We will create a new email address that will become a non-participating member of your mailing-list and will collect emails for your GForum mailing-list archiver.

    First, create a new forum for the mailing-list using the add forum command. Get the ID number from the "successfully added" screen. If you already have a forum, list all the forums and you can get the ID number looking at the details of the forum your want to use.

    We must then edit the sendmail aliases file. Often, it is located at "/etc/aliases". We will take advantage of the facility to associate a program with any arbitrary email address. For example: If we want to create a special listener on the Storytel mailing list with the email address storytel_arc@somehost.com (where somehost.com is your server's domain name) we can enter the following line into your aliases file. You will probably have to be root to make this change.

    storytel_arc: "|/home/website/cgi-bin/forum/admin/Plugins/GForum/archive.pl --forum=n"
    (n - is the forum ID)


    Up to the ":" is the the username for the new email address. The rest of the configuration string tells sendmail to invoke the script "archive.pl" every time an email comes in for that user.

    To make sure that your mail server is able to use this change, you must convert the "aliases" configuration file into a format that sendmail can understand. To do so, run the command "sendmail -bi" as root or as the mail system administrator.

    [root@penguin GForum]# sendmail -bi
    /etc/aliases: 20 aliases, longest 70 bytes, 307 bytes total
    Jan 17 09:50:49 192 sendmail[9398]: alias database /etc/aliases rebuilt by root


    Don't forget sign up this new email address to your mailing-list.
  • If you do not have the level of control to make changes to the "aliases" file or are under a different system, the "archive.pl" script runs as a mail pipe accepting emails from STDIN and places emails into the forum indicated by the --forum=id value. Contact your system administrator for the best option.


+ MailArc POP3 Guide :

    You may use MailArc to pull out all emails from a POP3 account and archive them into your GForum. The command below should be run directly from your command line or should be set up as a cron job:

    archive.pl --forum=x --pop-host=your_pop_host --pop-user=your_pop_user --pop-pass=your_pop_pass

my Christian web
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Re: [ccunet] Can you post via email with Gossamer Forum? In reply to
Thanks for the information! Now I need to talk to my host to see if this will work on his end. I think he runs qmail for his mailing program.

Thanks again,
Jamie
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Re: [ubu] Can you post via email with Gossamer Forum? In reply to
I use this on my site and it works perfectly. The plugin is called MailArc and is a free plugin developed by Gossamer Threads. I have mine set to interact via the POP3 connection.

Good Luck!

Dave
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Re: [bretzke] Can you post via email with Gossamer Forum? In reply to
Could you say some more about how you set it up?

Thanks

CCUnet
my Christian web
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Re: [ccunet] Can you post via email with Gossamer Forum? In reply to
Sure--

I actually have 4 listservs that I setup to document traffic. For each I setup a separate forum and a separate receiving email address, such that the listservs sent mail to these dummy accounts. Then I set Mailarc to extract mail twice a day (it uses a command line cron job) and it converts the email to posts in the designated forum. It was pretty easy to setup. Now, forum posts do *not* go back out to the listserv, but I'm sure that could be made to do so, if you wish. Prpbably a GT custom plugin.

I did complicate things though. The plugin works such that it builds a new disabled user for each new receiving email address....making the incoming email address the username. I mod'ed the plugin such that it searches the User table and if it finds the email address in the table is makes the post by the user..not a new user with the email address. In addition, I assign all not found email addresses to a generic 'Listserv' user I created.....I didn't want GForum to keep adding all these disabled users to my User table.

So that's it!

You obviously don't need to use only for a Listserv. You could pas out the designation email, telling folks to post via email, and letting them read from the forum or receive subscriptions to see additions from others. Not a very good use of a forum, but it would work.

I hope this helps.

Dave

Last edited by:

bretzke: Jun 2, 2004, 8:41 AM
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Re: [ubu] Can you post via email with Gossamer Forum? In reply to
Hi,

If you want to see a large scale example of this, have a look at:

http://gossamer-threads.com/lists/

It is a site we are working on to archive many of the internets more popular lists. It uses the Mailarc plugin to capture the emails and add them into Gossamer Forum, and some template work to make it more obvious that people can't post, but that it is an archive only.

Cheers,

Alex
--
Gossamer Threads Inc.
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Re: [Alex] Can you post via email with Gossamer Forum? In reply to
That is most cool! Add an XML template set and you've got RSS newsletter feeds for people who are moving their online lives into RSS aggregators.