We've been implementing a way for users to post via email.  Now, if you subscribe to a forum or a post not only do you get emails with the post information but you can respond to the post simply by replying to the email.

One issue we're having is the timeliness of the post.  The goal is for the post to be posted no more than 5 minutes after you send the email out.  Right now it may be many hours later.  We're tweaking this.

The "Post By Email" feature is fully functional so if you subscribe to a forum you'll get an email when there are new posts. You can reply to the posts now by email by simplying responding to the email. Pretty simple.

So I got a new Blackberry Pearl and thought of a few things I wish we had with our email functionality that I want to bring up:

1. When someone uploads a file, picture etc. it isn't showing up on the emails. There were a couple of examples of this just today for those of us subscribed to the CFA forum. Is there anyway to upgrade/fix the email functionality to include uploaded documents, ppts, and images on the emails that appear in our inboxs from the threads on the site?

2. This is probally more important than number one...I find it annoying that when we click on the link to the thread from the message in our own email (which we probally had to sign into to get or is on our own PC) that the site doesn't automatically recognize that we linked to it from there and thus log us in automatically. It would be very convienent and possibly increase forum traffic if you could click on the link in your email to view the thread and be already logged in when the thread pops up from clicking the link. This would be even more convenient when trying to get to the forums from an iphone, BB, or other smartphone.

Today, I wanted to post on one of the threads but didn't have an email from that thread on my phone. When I tried to go to the forums from my phone's browser there was a java script error that didn't allow me to log in. I tried upwards of 5 times and it wouldn't work no matter where I tried to log in from. Being logged in when linking from an email would solve this problem as well.

Just some thoughts. Are these requests to far out there or possible in the near future?

I'm hoping to upgrade the forum over the T-day holiday. The first issue may be addressed though I'm not sure. The second one I don't think will be (except the JS error may go away) but I'll keep this all in mind and we'll see what happens with the new version of the forum.

We changed it up now so that if dudes reply to an email but don't use the [END] token it will still cut off the email chain from the post. So if they don't use the token their responses might have the crackberry or Iphone appended spam but it won't have the long email chain. Pretty much no reason to even use the token now.