CS2: E-mail subscriptions for forums with E-mail Gateway
Today on a topic that I haven't seen that much written on. There was a new whitepaper the other day on this topic, and there's been some posts about the E-mail Gateway (EG). But from what I have seen, mostly together with the blog by e-mail feature.
What I wanted to talk about in this post is what the EG brings to the Forums of Community Server.
First just a brief mention on how to e-mail enable a forum. After you correctly have installed the EG and installed the license for it, there is a new TAB in the forums settings called 'Mailing List'. In CS 2.0 you get there by Control Panel -> Administration -> Forums -> Forums -> Click on the forum name -> Choose the 'Mailing List' TAB.
On that TAB you should see this:
To enable e-mail for the forum click in 'Yes', provide a name for the mailing list which will show up in mails sent from that forum, and also type in an e-mail address that you want the forum to have. You can also set a Footer that will be sent in each e-mail coming from that forum. I won't go into the passive mode in this post. If you want to know more about that let me know.
After these actions your forum is e-mail enabled, and when you now go into that forum you will se an 'Email Available' image in the lower right of the forum page.
When you click that image (not the one above in this post if you tried that) it will take you to the E-mail Subscriptions page for that forum.
If you check the checkbox on that page, and then click on save, you will get all new posts in that forum to the e-mail address that you registered at the forum with.
But that's far from all. You can now also e-mail your posts to that forum, as long as you send the e-mails from your registered e-mail address to the address you created on the 'Mailing List' TAB above. For example you can start a new thread by just sending an e-mail. Or you can reply to an e-mail notification you got from that forum, and it will show up as an answer in the respective thread.
IMO, this is a a great feature of CS 2.0, on which you also could easily build upon for different purposes. On friday I will try to give you an example of a solution that could be made on top of this feature together with another CS feature without writing any code.
See there, I made a cliff hanger! Now you just have to read my post on friday, and you won't be able to sleep for the whole week ;-)