Mailing List Manager

The Mailing List Manager admin control panel allows the administrator to define mailing list rules that allow FUDforum to archive messages from a mailing list as well as allow the forum's own messages to be sent to the mailing list.

IMPORTANT: This type of functionality requires your system to have a working Procmail or Postfix utility, which will pipe messages from the mailing list into your forum. One can also write a script to cat or type messages from files into the forum.

[edit] Configure a new mailing list

Enter the following fields to configure a new mailing list and click on the "Add Mailing List Rule" button when done:

[edit] Mailing List Email

The E-mail address of the mailing list, if you specify that messages posted in the forum are to be sent to the mailing list as well, those messages will be sent to this email address.

[edit] Forum

Choose a forum, which will be associated with this particular mailing list, meaning that messages from the mailing list will be imported into this forum.

IMPORTANT: You can only assign 1 mailing list per forum, therefore the forum select will ONLY show you the forums that are not yet associated with any other mailing lists or newsgroups.

[edit] Moderate Mailing List Posts

This option specifies whether or not the moderator(s) will be required to approve messages imported from the mailing list before they are made visible on the forum to the general public.

[edit] Synchronize Forum Posts to Mailing List

Whether or not to forward messages that were posted on the forum to the mailing list. If selected when a user posts a message, the forum will send the messages to the mailing list on behalf of the user.

IMPORTANT: Many mailing lists will require people to be signed up before being able to post to the list, which is most often done to prevent spammers from spamming the list. Therefore, the user unless already subscribed, may receive an email from the list asking them to subscribe as a prerequisite to their messages appearing on the mailing list.

[edit] Moderate Forum Posts

Whether or not moderator(s) of this forum will be required to approve posts made by forum members before those posts are synchronized to the mailing list.

[edit] Allow Mailing List Attachment

If enabled, ANY file attachment attached to a message on the mailing list will be imported into the forum regardless of any limitations imposed on file attachments within the forum.

[edit] Allow HTML in Mailing List Messages

If enabled, HTML contained within mailing list messages that are imported will not be stripped. This is not recommended because it may cause layout problems if the HTML is not valid as well as other issues that result in allowing HTML, such as JavaScript, etc...

[edit] Slow Reply Match

Certain mail clients do not sent send necessary headers needed to determine if a message is a reply to an existing message. If this option is enabled and normally available reply headers are not there, the forum will try to determine if message is a reply by comparing the message's subject to subjects of existing messages in the forum.

[edit] Create New Users

When importing messages from the mailing list, should a new user be created for every mailing list author, who cannot be matched against an existing forum user. If this option is set to 'No', then all imported mailing list messages who's authors can not be matched against existing forum members will be attributed to the anonymous user.

[edit] Skip Non-Forum Users

When importing messages, should the messages posted from users who cannot be matched to existing forum members be ignored.

[edit] Subject Mangling (optional)

Often mailing list prepend a special string to the subject of every message so that it is easy to identify the messages coming from the mailing list. In the forum environment those are quite useless, this option allows administrator to specify a regular expression that will be applied to the subject, allowing the administrator to change and/or filter certain strings from the subject.

The replacement is performed by PHP's preg_replace.

• Replace mask:

The string you wish to alter and/or replace.

The smaller text box on the right allows the administrator to specify various regular expression flags to be used, such as 'i', 'm', etc...

• Replace with:

Replace the string that matches above regular expression with this.

[edit] Body Mangling (optional)

In most cases mailing lists will append a some sort of a string to the bottom of the message, this usually contains information on the mailing list itself as well as how to subscribe/unsubscribe from the list. In the forum that text is not really needed, so you can use this option to use regular expression to remove and/or change this or any other data from the message body.

The replacement is performed by PHP's preg_replace.

• Replace mask:

The string you wish to alter and/or replace.

• Replace with:

Replace the string that matches above regular expression with this.

[edit] Custom Headers

This field allows you to specify custom headers, that will be appended to any existing headers sent by the forum when posting a message to the mailing list. To avoid problem enter each header on a seperate line and do not place blank lines.

[edit] Forum Signature

A string of text to append to the end of every message sent from the forum back to the mailing list.

[edit] Edit existing mailing lists

At the bottom of the control panel there is a list of existing mailing list rules. Each entry shows 3 pieces of information about the mailing list:

• Mailing List Rule, which an identifier of the rule - the email address of the mailing list represents the value of this option.
• Forum the name of the forum associated with this mailing list rule.
• Exec Line this field contains the execution line to use to pipe messages into the forum.

Options are presented to either edit or delete each of the listed mailing list rules.

[edit] Import messages

E-mail messages can simply be piped into the maillist.php script to load them into the designated forum. For example, on Windows systems, one can simply run the following commands from the command prompt (Start -> Run, cmd, OK):

type 0471.msg | c:\lamp\php\bin\php.exe maillist.php 1

and on Linux/Unix systems:

cat 0471.msg | /usr/local/bin/php maillist.php 1

Errors will be logged to the errors/.mlist/ directory.

:0:
 * ^TO_.*php-general@lists.php.net
 | /home/FUDdata/scripts/maillist.php 1

list-bot: "|/usr/local/bin/php /full/path/to/FUDforum/scripts/maillist.php 1"

IMPORTANT: maillist.php is a PHP script, that requires you to have a PHP binary (cgi/cli). On most Linux systems, this binary can be found in /usr/local/bin/php. If your PHP binary is not in /usr/local/bin/php, you may need to change the first line of the maillist.php script from #!/usr/local/bin/php to #!/path/to/your/php/binary.

[edit] Also see

• FudBOX.php, a helper script that can be used to pipe an mbox file with E-mail messages into a forum.
• Newsgroup Manager, control panel for loading USENET posts.
• XML Aggregation, control panel for loading XML feeds into a forum.