I am primarily a farmer, not a coder. Best I can claim is a bit of perl. phpBB while extensible, it's not really trivial to do so. If I can find a turnkey solution I will do so.
I'm asking for 4 pretty extensive mods for phpBB
* Email subscription module to send the appropriate notifications.
* Email processing module to turn replies into posts.
* Arbitrary html+css code embedding.
* Anti-spam module (a common problem with list servers.)
In addition: what about race conditions? Thread is posted to sub-forum A, notification goes out, thread is moved to another subforum, reply comes back.
Each one requires a configuration screen.
The subscriptions module also has to have a user configuration segment for the user to manage his subscriptions.
My suspicion is that the code for these would run thousands of lines.
If you do a search for the terms forum, email, integration, you get a TON of hits, all looking for this, with, (so far) no solutions.
I have found:
email list servers with additional web based interfaces.
forums with limited rich text editors
so far:
* Have not found forum that supports full range of embedded html+css
* Have not found forum that supports email interface other than notification of a followup message to a single thread.
* Have not found list server that supports any sort of html in messages.
For those that do have some features of both, the ultimate categorization I make as follows:
List server:
* primary agency is email.
* no hierarchical structure.
Forum
* primary agency is web.
* has hierarchical structure (folders, sub forums...)