vBulletin & Integrated Email Question

[filburt1]

vBMS for vBulletin 3.0 has no significant issues, but vBMS for 3.5 is in a pre-final state with some known issues, mainly compatibility issues for integrating with vBulletin. Given I need to reverse-engineer vBulletin in order to integrate with it, it slows things down a bit.

[Kurisu]

The vBulletin guys are busy working on vb


@simsim: Well it depends on your needs: Amount of sites, age and background of users, topic of your forum etc.

Let's assign a value to the features and possibilites of both products. If we say VBMS has a value of 100, then Socketmail (Pro) should have around 2000.

[DHewes]

Hivemail - absolutely dead and buried.

vBMS - I emailed these guys several times and there is NOT a production version that supports vB 3.5x+. The "beta" version sort of does - you have to read their forum for known issues. Also, read their forum and it is VERY clear that development and support is horrible. Out of fairness, I understand that this product is the developer's side project - not his day job - and it is great work, but it takes a back seat to what pays the bills. Completely understandable, but risky to invest in. (But it is very cheap) Also, it doesn't have a lot of features - just very nice vB integration - looks like another forum.

Sockmail has an actual team. The product has every feature you could want and more. It will integrate only in as much as it will share the user/password data from vB - there is no integration of the interface - it looks more like gmail (though it is skinable). For me, this is perfect. (Integration description based on feedback from dev team, I have not seen nor do I have actual knowledge of this).

As far as Jelsoft doing it - just search the entire forum for CMS and webmail and look at all the hits you get over the last 5+ years. There are forum mod's, dev team members and registered users all talking about both of these "coming" - and who knows, they may one day - but do you want to wait? It may be 30 days - it may be never. Socketmail is a real product here today, with vB integration most likely 60 days out (they say August, I give them a 1 month buffer).

Believe me, I have spent 6 months installing and testing every product out there - even ones that I have had to use Novell Identity Manager drivers to manual sync names/passwords. For the price, nothing comes close to the features of Sockmail - and if they come through on their promises then vB integration will be very simple and functional.

[Greps]

wait, so the new coming Socketmail will not have vBulletin interface integration? I couldn't care less about it's oh-so-uber gmail-like ajax interface (if I really wanted that I'd go with Hosted Gmail), I just want my users to be able to read their emails from within the forum, and I want to be able to change usergroup permissions for using the email system. will that be possible with new Socketmail?

[filburt1]

I agree that vBMS development isn't as quick as I would like for the reasons you already attributed, but I wouldn't say development is horrible; that would imply that the underlying code is no good. The code is fine, just a lot of it broke when the majority of vBulletin's internals were rewritten for 3.5. As there was no extensive developer documentation by Jelsoft for what changed and suggestions for adapting old code, it is difficult to partially port old code to a new vBulletin codebase. Hypothetically speaking, this wouldn't be an issue if Jelsoft developed the product because, of course, as the developers of the product with which vBMS integrates, there would be no issues with reverse-engineering.

vBMS 2.5 (the version for vBulletin 3.5) does add quite a few new features over previous versions. The features are targeted more towards vBulletin integration (one-click installs, tight integration with the user list, vB-powered editors, etc.) rather than generic e-mail features (message tracking, etc.).

But I digress; if you feel SocketMail better suits your immediate needs, you can go ahead and buy a license for it. I have no experience with it and thus can't compare it to other products, including vBMS. The only thing I have learned about it over the years is that it is designed to be standalone with integration provided through a code interface a la programs like Hivemail.

[DHewes]

Greps - Sorry, I was not real clear there. The NEW version, not yet out, due in August, will supposedly have 100% integration with the vBulletin database, so users and passwords will work fine - and the users should register in vB and be auto-assigned an email account. From that perspective there is supposed to be full integration. What I meant was that the interface itself was not integrated like vBMS. With vBMS, you may look at it and not even realize it is email - it looks exactly like another forum. It integrates it's interface as tightly as Photopost Classified and Photopost Reviews does. SocketMail is a seperate product - that integrates on the backend, vBMS is a plugin that extends the functionality of vB.

filburt1 - Yes, I meant that "New Development Responce Times" were apparently horrible, not the actual quality of the product or code. vB 3.5 is at the 4th patch level, with 3.6 around the corner, and vBMS does not support 3.5x yet. (I do not count beta as I would not run beta code on a production site).

I believe that SocketMail and vBMS are different product for totally different needs. Let's assume that SocketMail comes through on their integration promise - and that vBMS releases production code that works with 3.5x... In that case these are the ONLY two viable options to provide email from within your vB providing addresses on your domain, integrated into the vB database. (There are a number of hacks to allow users to add a web interface to an external email, and I have seen a couple hacks to provide the beta gmail domains emails) If you want a smooth, small and tightly integrated plugin for a low price - vBMS. If you want a full blown webmail interface where you can set all kinds of rules, signatures and other features, integrate other external POP3 accounts, etc. etc. and just re-use the vB user data, then SocketMail (3x the price of vBMS) is the best option. SocketMail is also adding POP3/SMTP functionality in the new release. Just depends what you want and why. Both are nice, both have dev work to do before they actually work in the current vB release and both are fairly inexpensive.

[filburt1]

FYI, for nitpicking, vBMS does support filters and signatures (the latter pulled from your user CP's signature).

A lot of people are talking about Gmail hosted mail, but I would never do that merely for security reasons (I don't trust having my mail on servers I don't control). That and, of course, Gmail won't match your forums' appearance, so it won't be as well integrated.

[TheComputerGuy]

http://board.b1g.de/showthread.php?t=6415&highlight=english

I was impressed with this product a few years ago looking for an alternative to hivemail

Now I used Gmail Hosted for my sites mail!

[welo]

This seems to have potential.

[Kwak]

Bump for this is an idea worth delving into.