topic Re: IMAP working, but... in Alfresco Archive

IMAP working, but...

andreas_wilmsme — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:54:32 GMT

Hi, I have downloaded Alfresco 3.2lab and have successfully installed it. I have activated IMAP support and its working with MS Outlook 2007 as an IMAP client. However, I faced some issues I could not resolve following the instructions I had:I dragged and dropped an Email from my Email account in to

Re: IMAP working, but...

mrogers — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 08:32:18 GMT

I was looking at this yesterday and there seems to be a problem with metadata extraction that would account for the subject line not showing correctly. Apparently there were some very late last minute changes that broke it :cry: A JIRA issue has been raised for this problem ETHREEOH-2442.

However preview was working for me and most of the functionality (except metadata extraction) seemed to be O.K.

Re: IMAP working, but...

mikef — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:31:57 GMT

FYI. The reason the email subject is not used for the name is to support filesystem access (CIFS, FTP etc). The subject could contain characters that are not supported by file system file names.

Re: IMAP working, but...

mrogers — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:46:15 GMT

It would be better to try to use the subject and only substitute a value if it contains problematic characters.

Re: IMAP working, but...

andreas_wilmsme — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:07:39 GMT

I agree, the generated document name is meaningless to human readers.
Would there be a way to customize that behaviour in my system?
Andreas

Re: IMAP working, but...

andreas_wilmsme — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 19:09:41 GMT

One more question: In the generated Email view for documents, Alfresco shows "localhost" instead of the real host name defined in the global.properties under "imap.server.host"

Any help appeciated,
Andreas

Re: IMAP working, but...

mrogers — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:51:47 GMT

Unfortunatly I don't think you can customise the name property in the current version but it's something that we will look into. You could hack the code to make a small fix but that's not the permenent solution.

Re: IMAP working, but...

aborba — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 21:47:52 GMT

If you try to set the name of the file to the message subject, you might run into trouble when you have two messages with the same subject

Re: IMAP working, but...

samuel_penn — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:11:50 GMT

SMTP import of email uses the subject as the name of the imported mail, and newer mails with the same subject overwrite older emails. This is not entirely ideal 🙂

Playing with 3.2 community, I do notice that the way in which IMAP emails are handled is very different to how SMTP emails are handled. For mails added through IMAP, they have the content type of Email (with no metadata added), whereas mail added by SMTP has the Email aspect which includes extracted metadata. Attachments are also handled differently.

Are there any plans to combine the functionality so that it is consistent? It would be nice if the IMAP inbox could be setup as an email alias, so that inbound email automatically becomes visable in the IMAP client. Currently, only documents of content type Email are displayed, so mail sent into Alfresco via SMTP isn't visible from IMAP.

Looking at the JIRA issue, I guess the lack of any metadata on IMAP emails is currently a bug, but it would be nice if both bits of email functionality worked in a similar way. Has this already been thought about?

Apart from the above points, IMAP integration does seem to just work much as I'd expect it to, so thanks to the Alfresco team for that.

Sam.

Re: IMAP working, but...

samuel_penn — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 14:15:20 GMT

Another point I forgot to mention: Attachments are added as a separate file, but also left in the message body (MIME encoded), meaning that attachments are included twice in Alfresco. I can see both advantages and disadvantages to this, so not sure if this is by design or not.

Sam.

Re: IMAP working, but...

jmdavid — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 13:42:34 GMT

The extraction of multipart doesn't work with Thunderbird (tested with 2.0.0.22); works well with Outlook.

Re: IMAP working, but...

_sax — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 13:04:29 GMT

For us, it's also working, but until know we're still wondering, where the virtual view or preview would take place. Is it inside Alfresco, thus providing a custom folder view (how would that view be applied?) or is it happening in Outlook?

And a second question would be, how to configure the indivdual mount points.

Out of

imap.config.home.store=${spaces.store}
imap.config.home.rootPath=/${spaces.company_home.childname}
imap.config.home.folderPath=Imap Home

imap.config.home.store=${spaces.store}
imap.config.home.rootPath=/${spaces.company_home.childname}
imap.config.home.folderPath=Imap Home
imap.config.server.mountPoints=AlfrescoIMAP
imap.config.server.mountPoints.default.mountPointName=IMAP
imap.config.server.mountPoints.default.modeName=ARCHIVE
imap.config.server.mountPoints.default.store=${spaces.store}
imap.config.server.mountPoints.default.rootPath=/${spaces.company_home.childname}
imap.config.server.mountPoints.value.AlfrescoIMAP.mountPointName=Alfresco IMAP
imap.config.server.mountPoints.value.AlfrescoIMAP.modeName=MIXED

we we're not able to reduce the imported IMAP folders to a subset of company home. It always imports everything (that's viewable of course), but that still is a little more, than what would be needed. So, presuming to have a folder named Software Project under company home, how could I exclusively mount this instead of everything?

Re: IMAP working, but...

andreas_wilmsme — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 10:31:25 GMT

Thanks for the feedback so far.

I have also noticed that MS Outlook 2007 often crashes when I try to open an Email I previously exported to Alfresco. Opening the Emails from out of Alfresco (as they are in EML format Outlook Express will be used to them locally) works just fine.

I guess that MS Outlook 2007 has an issue handling the EML format? Would there be a way of converting into .MSG instead of .EML when storing Emails in ALfresco? Did anybody else have the same issue? Any help or pointers on this issue?

Also: I'm still trying to figure out how to make Alfresco use my real host name instead of "localhost" in the preview.

Any help appreciated,
Andreas

Re: IMAP working, but...

_sax — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 13:20:47 GMT

This is maybe linked to new feature sets inside Office more, than to Alfresco's side.
http://discussions.virtualdr.com/showthread.php?t=220351
In Vista, Microsoft changed the CIFS behaviour, which led to problems with Alfresco, maybe this is the case with IMAP, too.

Just out of curiosity: Where is your preview displayed? Inside Alfresco or in the mail client, Outlook? How did you apply the preview?

Re: IMAP working, but...

andreas_wilmsme — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 18:00:23 GMT

Thanks for the link, I'll check if applying the patch stops Outlook from crashing.
CIFS is working fine for me now after I figured out that it is not working when I connect via my T-Mobile DE UMTS card (which I usually do).

I display the preview in Outlook, for all non-Email document I see the "localhost" reference. the preview is just generated with the out-of-the-box template of Alfresco.
Andreas