EXT: Import mail messages to tt_news records¶

What does it do?¶

• Automatically polls an IMAP or POP3 account at chosen intervals (run by cronjob) and imports e-mail messages to tt_news and/or t3blog items.
• The contents of the email messages are stored as title, bodytext, short, image, news_files, author, author_email and datetime. You are free to configure how and where fields should be imported (see 'fieldMarkers')
• Capable of importing multiple images in one message
• Imports selected types of other attachments into tt_news field news_files (or a custom field when using t3blog, to be configured manually)
• Allows to specify news categories, storage pid and backend user (cruser_id) and any other field which you need to set per imported message (see 'fieldMarkers') or needs to get a static value (see 'fieldPresetValues')
• Allows you to post messages on your website directly from your email, e.g. from your mobile phone (moblogging)
• Checks sender email: only mail from matching email addresses will be processed
• Optionally hides new messages
• Takes care of conversion to characterset as defined in TYPO3 setup (localconf.php)
• Recognizes links, url's and emails in plain text emails and produce html-links accordingly
• Allows for multiple instances in 1 TYPO3 installation, so it's possible to use it in a multi-domain site, or e.g. using different configurations for importing to tt_news and t3blog
• Easily configurable through Extension Manager (general default settings) and Mail2news Importer Records (for each individual instance)
• Works with the TYPO3 system extension Scheduler (available since 4.3), so it no longer needs a separate cronjob to run

Since version 1.9.7 you can create Mail2news Importer Records. If you do not use the importer records, mail2news will just poll 1 mailbox using the settings from the Extension Manager (and so maintaining backwards compatibility).

Please report issues at http://forge.typo3.org/projects/extension- mail2news

Screenshots¶

All configuration of the extension is done in the extension manager (EM). The current version of the extension has more configuration options than shown on this screenshot, see the part 'Configuration' of this manual for a description of all options.

FAQ¶

none so far

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FAQ¶

none so far

Configuration settings¶

All configuration of the extension is done in the extension manager. (See screenshot) You will find the following settings:

TS Config Options (New in version 2.0 !): fieldMarkers¶

fieldMarkers are a very important new feature: they replace the settings 'Category line identifier' and 'Subheader line identifier' from the 1.x.x versions. With the fieldMarkers you can use TS Config to define markers like #cat# (but could be anything), with which you can define the categories (tt_news or t3blog) that should be added to new imported message.

Examples:

mod.tx_mail2news.fieldMarkers.categories = #cats#

will allow you to write an email message like this:

Subject: This is the subject-line

#cats# Frontpage, important news, 12This is the content of this message, of course it doesn't deal with anything specific and nothing particular.

This message will get imported with:

title = This is the subject-linebodytext = This is the content of this …

The message will get the following categories attached: 'Frontpage' and 'important news' (if they exist, otherwise these categories will be ignored) and the category with uid 12. You can freely mingle category uid's and category names – if you use a number, mail2news assumes it's a uid.

The key fieldMarkers.categories is specifically defined for mail2news in order to process multiple categories and this works both for tt_news and t3blog.

Store data in any field

It gets even better: you can create fieldMarkers for almost any field that exists in the tables in which you'll be importing (currently tt_news for news items, or tx_t3blog_post and tt_content for blog items).

For example:

mod.tx_mail2news {fieldMarkers {// process categories after the marker #cat#categories = #cat#// the line beginning with #short# will be imported in the tt_news field 'short' (subheader)short = #short#// This line:// #start# 5-10-2011 14:15// will be translated to a unix timestamp to make TYPO3 understand the date// (following your servers locale settings) and the result is stored in field tx_newscalendar_calendardatetx_newscalendar_calendardate = #start#tx_newscalendar_calendardate.parseDate = 1tx_newscalendar_calendardate_end = #end#tx_newscalendar_calendardate_end.parseDate = 1}}

Transform date notation to unix timestamp

As shown above, you can even use fields added by other extensions, like newscalendar in this example. The property parseDate = 1 is a special function in mail2news to recognize dates written as strings and transform them to unix timestamp format (otherwise you would have to write timestamps in your email, quite uncomfortable...)

Set fixed values (or defaults if marker is not mentioned in message)

TS Config Option: fieldPresetValues¶

With fieldPresetValues you can define fixed values which should be stored in a certain field. With t3blog for example, your message content will be stored in a tt_content record. If you include a picture, it will always be in the same position from the text. With the following TS Config settings you can define the value that will be used by mail2news for the tt_content field 'imageorient':

mod.tx_mail2news {fieldPresetValues {// example: set the imageorient field (tt_content, for use with t3blog) to value 16 by default.imageorient = 16}}

Now if you also want to be able to choose this value for each specific message, you just define a fieldMarker as well:

mod.tx_mail2news {fieldPresetValues {imageorient = #orientation#}}

Now you can use the line #orientation# 2 above your email message to override the default value 16 which we've just set, and fill the field 'imageorient' with the value '2' for this record.

For backward compatibility with older mail2news versions:

To make mail2news behave exactly like in version 1.9.9 and below, set this in TS Configuration in root page:

mod.tx_mail2news {fieldMarkers {categories = ##short = &&}}

What will be processed?

You can use as many fieldPresetValues and fieldMarkers as you wish. fieldMarkers override fieldPresetValues , if the marker is found in the message of course.

• The first lines of the body of the email message are scanned for markers
• as many lines are scanned as there are fieldMarkers defined (if you have 4 fieldMarkers defined, the first 4 lines of the email message will be scanned for markers)
• a marker should start at the first position of a line in an email
• if a marker is recognized in those lines, that line, and all lines above will be stripped from the record content
• a marker could be anything (the format '#marker#' is just a convention) but can not contain white space characters
• if a marker is recognized, all content that follows on that line will be trimmed (from starting and ending spaces) and processed

Reference¶

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Credits¶

• Thanks to Jonas Dübi for constructive feedback

  Sponsoring:

• Thanks to Etienne Girardet (www.pacificografik.de, Berlin) for sponsoring the initial version and added features

• Thanks to Sebastian Wendler (Pro Tours AG, Hannover) for feature sponsoring

• Thanks to the Dutch Trade Union CNV for supporting the new features for importing to t3blog, adding the fieldMarkers feature with the parseDate option.

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