Suggestion: PM - reply by email

[austinreefclub]

The Issue:
I get reply emails all day long in the mail account that sends out board emails even though I have implemented to following changes.

1. I have edited the language sting of the email and added this to the top:

PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL. This email is generated automatically, and is not monitored for responses.

2. I also added an auto-responder to the account that says:

OOPS you sent an email to an unmonitored email account. Your message was not received by its intended recipient. You must log into domain.com to reply to personal messages.

3. The account is named: do-not-reply@domain.com

My Suggestion:
I suggest just letting people respond to PMs by email. IPB could monitor the SMTP email account grab the message and forward it to the intended recipient via PM. You could add unique identifies to the subject of the email and have the system look for those.

My proposed email example:

From: TheBoardEmailAddress [mailto:TheBoardEmailAddress@domain.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 03, 2010 8:39 AM
To: The User
Subject:You have been sent a new personal conversation - The PM Title [PM=11234]

When replying, type your text above this line. Do not alter the subject line.

Hey user this is a PM.

[bfarber]

I'd love to do this, but having to support it with all the various possible hosting accounts our customers may be using makes it a lot more difficult.

[Robulosity2]

The next request that would come is not requiring

When replying, type your text above this line. Do not alter the subject line.

The other problem is, what about when users try sending attachments? Or Virus's or other random crap.. You'd also have to be able to support 7 & 8 Bit MIME encoding, base-64 among with others and have a way to insert that content into the database universally.

Plus, there's the "Re Re RE RE Re re" stuff, so that would need to be compensated for.

Plus, if you're site is not overly busy you won't see much benefit from this simply because nothing would trigger the PHP Process (unless you have CRON/Scheduling which not everyone does) to pull & parse them