There has a been a few requests for the forum to support email including this enhancement request
(http://www.1060.org/bugxter/main/edit_bug?id=123) :

It would be useful if you could subscribe to a thread, and receive email notifications when there is a reply (with the contents of the reply). I would imagine that subscription would be automatic by starting or replying to a thread, but this behaviour should be configurable in the users profile. It would also be useful to be able to subscribe to a forum (e.g. subscribe to all topics in "Solutions Developer"). The emails should have a common format title so that users can filter the emails if they so wish.

It has also been suggested that the ability to post messages to the forum by email once registered.

Personally I find the RSS feeds along with Thunderbird work really well for my needs. I also like the rich AJAX editor for posting messages because I think the formatting adds a lot the readability of messages. But I'd like to solicit any other feedback before we look to implement any changes so that we take account of any other desirable modes of use.

Please post any comments on this thread.

Cheers,
Tony

The reason that I am not an avid RSS user is the lack of decent support in OS X. Mac Mail doesn't support RSS feeds (yet... I believe Leopard will add it), the RSS reader in Safari doesn't add the functionality and I have never managed to get into the habit of using a standalone RSS reader.

The replying by email is not that important, I just thought it would be cool!

Cheers,

Chris

OK. OK. The people have spoken ;-)  I will add email notifications next week - I can foresee that it will be pretty straight forward.  When you start seeing emails arriving then you know its live ;-P

Email notification is now operating on the forum.  There are two levels of operation.

1.  Option to receive email posts of all entrys in topics in which you have been active.  By default all users have this option selected.  It can be switched off in by viewing your profile.

2.  Optional selective subscription to invidual forums.  By default this option is off.  Add subscriptions by editing your profile.

Enjoy,

Pete

PS Please report any problems.

Cheers Pete!

Looks like it is working a treat!

Chris

The hard part was relearning the database schema and then overcoming some MySQL bugs I cam across.  Adding to the NK web layer was very simple.  There is now an email dispatcher service that is called each time a topic/entry is posted.  A data services generates the email subscriber list and the dispatcher just iterates over it sending out the message.