Hi Vantel, I did not get that error I use 1.6.1... it all worked smoothly, but I still can not get the from address to match my domain (it goes from my server address)... perhaps removing that "Net" bit will help me? I guess I'll try it... thanks.

Hi Dan, hi all,

Firstly, thanks a lot for posting this module.  I am sure it must have taken a lot of effort.  I don't know if anyone is using it yet but I thought that I would share some experiences.  Unlike probably a chunk of this community I am being paid to write code for an Elgg-based system so (with Dan's blessing) maybe I can help get some more tweaks/fixes done to this module (providing it fits in with what we are doing in our project).

Anyway, I have only been working this this module for half a day so my understanding is still rudamentary (and I am new to Elgg), so please correct me if I am wrong, but here are some things I found along the way

1)  topic.php (function add_topic) seems to have a bug in it.  The message (the body of the email) never gets added to the group post.  The consequence of this is that new topics have a subject, but no body.  The fix to this is to add this code at line 47 (or around there)

$grouptopic->description = $message;

2) This module seems to support plain text emails just fine, but does not seem to like multi-part (i don't know about html only, maybe they are fine too).  multi-part emails end up as posts that have a lot of spurious header-type information in them.  we have a community of Outlook users so i am going to have to try to figure out how to address that.

3) I don't have a clear idea of the usage pattern of this module yet.  If i email into the system and it creates a new topic, another user should get sent an email with the message in. if they reply to that email then it should posted as a comment.  i don't know if this is how it works for everyone else, we are working off a customized version of Elgg, but it does not seem to for us.  the notification email sent by the system would need to have the group name in the email address.  ours does not currently, but maybe that is our problem! :-)

4)  This could be my lack of understand of PHP config, but I had to tweak the code to get this module working.  In mail.php the call to handle_messages (line 167) threw an exception because $tags was not set.  I was not sure how the tags there related to the tags potentially stored in the $message_info.  I was not too worried about tagging today, so I just set a $tags variable to blank and it allows me to proceed.  The same is true if the call to add_topic (where $message_info['tags'] is not a valid array entry)

5)  The module might be improved somewhat by some handling of outlier cases.  At the moment if the email cannot be processed it gets deleted anyway.  This might be necessary with a pop3 mailbox, but it might be hard to troubleshoot issues in a production system like this.

6)  I had to debug the code to find out what format the subject line had to be in.  As far as I can make out the subject line needs to end in [my topic name goes here] (including the brackets).  I imagine the brackets are to delimit the text so that "RE:" (or whatever) does not get in the way.  

Thanks again,

Andy

hi there,

has anyone managed to get this module working successfully yet?  it seems like the fact that the framework does not pass through the actual comment being posted there are some workarounds with globals that (for me at least) are causing some issues.  one thing i am interested in - if a comment is added by the non-group/topic owner do correct emails get sent out?

cheers,andy