Setup for opentaps email Handling

The Special opentaps Email Client

This section discusses special opentaps processing for email, which can be configured by a technical system administrator.

opentaps includes an email client with some special features that present your business email as a part of the context for teamwork and coordination. Thus, it is well worth the effort to set up email in order that the user's email can appear in the activity information for all business transactions (Cases, Orders, Accounts, etc.) on the system.

opentaps email makes use of your existing outbound email service (SMTP) and your existing inbound email service (POP3, or IMAP) when the users email IDs are entered in opentaps by Setting User Profile, and the email server address and server authentication info are configured into the relevant opentaps system files. Also, a regular expression string is configured to provide for detecting the email addresses that are relevant to your opentaps business processing.

Some minor additional configuration of your inbound email server software is required to route email to the opentaps special address for inbound email reception.

When your outbound email is copied to this special address it is archived in context with the related opentaps transactions similar to the inbound email as we have discussed.

Finally, the teamwork context of opentaps can be enhanced further by enabling notification emails to your team members whenever certain things happen, which they should be made aware of, including:

  * When people are added or removed from activities or events
  * When people are assigned to leads and accounts
  * When catalog requests have been successfully fulfilled 
  * Optional -- When a catalog request is fulfilled an email can be sent to the customer who
      requested it.

From this description it is evident that configuring the email for opentaps processing is a task for the same technical administrator who has set up your regular email service, or someone who is familiar with system file configuration, email setup, and programming scripts that use regular expressions.

Configure User Email Addresses

Here we assume that you have set up your email Users with User addresses and passwords that are compatible with your outbound SMTP business mail server (or service), and your inbound IMAP (or POP3) business mail server (or service). Inbound IMAP is preferred. Before you set up opentaps email you should have completed the configuration of these two email services, and have a list of their email addresses for reference.

Configure each of your opentaps Users on the opentaps system as described in Create Users and User Profiles. When you enter their email information be sure to use the same email address for each User that you have configured on your company email servers.

Thus, the opentaps email client will be using the same email addresses as your Users have already been assigned.

If you want to use different email addresses for your Users now, then you need to set up different email addresses for them on your email services first, and then assign the same new email addresses to the Users on opentaps in their User Profile page.

Now, we can configure the opentaps email client to use these User addresses with your email services, providing the additional special functions to support teamwork coordination on business processes in opentaps.

Outbound Email Setup

To enable the opentaps email client to send outbound mail through your company SMTP mail server proceed as follows:

*  Open a terminal session on your opentaps server
*  Change directories on your opentaps server to the opentaps installation directory
*  Edit this file: framework/common/config/general.properties
*  Edit this line to read: mail.notifications.enabled=Y
*  Edit this line: mail.smtp.relay.host=yourmailserverurl
   (example - mail.yourcompany.com)
*  If your mail server requires an ID and password to authenticate then
   Edit: mail.smtp.auth.user=yourauthenticationname_goes_here
   Edit: mail.smtp.auth.password=yourauthenticationpassword_goes_here
   Leave these two blank if you don't use this authentication type
*  If you want to control the maximum upload size in bytes then
   Edit: http.upload.max.size=yourvalue_goes_here
*  Save your changes to this file.

This file contains special configuration options you can use for gmail compatibility as needed.

This completes the configuration for outbound email.

Inbound Email Setup

To process inbound e-mails with opentaps, we recommend that you set up your mail server so that all your incoming e-mails are automatically forwarded to an e-mail address, your "default CRM email listener", with their original TO and CC intact. Opentaps can then be set up to listen to that e-mail address, your "default CRM email listener", and process all of the mail coming in for opentaps users.

Refer to your IMAP service software users guide and add another user address and password for the default CRM email listener. You can use the name "listener" if you like, or some other name such as "opentapsmail" for example.

Now, configure your IMAP service software to forward all incoming mail including the original addresses (TO:, CC:, etc) which must be preserved for processing by the special opentaps services. With this new address assigned and ready, we can configure the inbound mail service on opentaps, as follows:

*  Open a terminal session on your opentaps server
*  Change the directly to the opentaps installation directory
*  Open this file for editing: framework/base/config/ofbiz-containers.xml
*  Move down the file to the line that begins <container name=javamail-container. . . 
*  Edit the following entries to these new values:
       <property name="mail.host" value="put_your_mailhost_name_here" 
         you must keep the quote marks, for example "mail.mycompany.com" 
         or you can use the IP address, for example "192.168.3.10"
         or if the mail server and opentaps are on the same host, then "localhost"
       <property name="mail.user" value="put_your_username_here"
         you must keep the quote marks, for example "listener"  or "opentapsmail"
       <property name="mail.pass" value="put_the_password_here"
*  Edit the following entry to prevent overly large email from coming into your system:
       <property name="maxSize" value="size_limit_in_bytes"
         for example "10000000" for a 10 megabyte limit on each email
*  Edit the following entry to control deletion of email after it is captured by this client:
       <property name="delete-mail" value="true" 
         if you want the mail deleted immediately after it is transfered to the client
         or use value="false" if you want to keep the mail on the server for a another client 
         to transfer and then delete.
*  Save your changes to this file.

This completes configuration of the inbound service.