Alfresco and email

[shieldfire]

I am looking at Alfresco for a startup company (online-retail) which will handle a lot of small documents, as well as the actual products. I am looking at a seperate shop frontend software (possibly Oxid) and have two issues at this point.

* Email. I need email integration - Alfresco to pull email from an IMAP server into specific accounts on Alfresco depending on the email account it pulls mail from. Is this possible? Should I rather look at a seperate email client than something integrated in Alfresco? (I've been looking at emailcollector, but when I installed it on my lab server it seemed to fubar my admin password? -at least it wasn't possible to login after installation).

* CRM - is there a something integrating customer/contacts with stock housekeeping for Alfresco? I saw a project on Forge, but is seems like it hasn't released anything in a long while.

Any suggestions appreciated.

[mrogers]

To answer one part of your question.    Alfresco can't "pull" information from an external IMAP server.     

However Alfresco's inbuilt SMTP and IMAP servers allows you to send messages into alfresco via SMTP or IMAP. 
And you can read content in an alfresco repository via IMAP.

If you really do need to pull information from an external  IMAP server then it would not be too difficult to do, however that would require you to do some coding.   Perhaps you could start by considering what triggers the pull and what information needs to be obtained in response to that trigger?

[shieldfire]

Oh, OK - I can stop looking for something that pull mail from an external IMAP account then 😃
I'm a lousy (or at the very least slow) coder … and as my focus is elsewhere at this time, coding something myself isn't an option at the moment =(
So, is there documentation (the more noob friendly the better) on how to setup a IMAP2IMAP connection to direct mail form, say account xyz@acme.com to a specific "folder" or "repository"  in Alfresco.

The second part of your answer is easy. Anything from xyz@acme.com needs to be delivered to a specific "folder". And everything from xyz-1@acme.com to another, etc etc …

Maybe the best way is to integrate with Zimbra? I see there is something that does that …

[mrogers]

You just configure your email forwarding rules.

[hap234]

You can perform following steps in order to send email to alfresco repository from any email client.
Following steps given for configure Outlook Express with Alfresco3.2 version using IMAP.

Step 1 – Setup and Start the Alfresco Email Server

Edit the file Alfresco/tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco-global.properties.

# Alfresco Email Service and Email Server
#————-

# Enable/Disable the inbound email service.  The service could be used by processes other than
# the Email Server (e.g. direct RMI access) so this flag is independent of the Email Service.
#————-
email.inbound.enabled=true

# Email Server properties
#————-
email.server.enabled=true
email.server.port=25
email.server.domain=alfresco.com
email.inbound.unknownUser=anonymous

# A comma separated list of email REGEX patterns of allowed senders.
# If there are any values in the list then all sender email addresses
# must match.  For example:
#   .*\@alfresco\.com, .*\@alfresco\.org
# Allow anyone:
#————-
email.server.allowed.senders=.*

Step 2– Add Users to the EMAIL_CONTRIBUTORS group
While still in the Alfresco administration area on the Alfresco explorer client, go into group administration. Make sure that all users that are to be enabled to submit email uploads to Alfresco are part of the Alfresco group EMAIL_CONTRIBUTORS.

Step 3– Setup email aliases for Alfresco folders (spaces)

Identify which folders in Alfresco that you'd like users to be able to submit to. To do that, navigate to each of the target folders in the repository.
For example, here is a new folder in my user home area that is called "Email Inbox"
On examination of the properties for this folder, you can see an entry called "Email ID".This is really all you need for being able to send emails. I can do an email upload submit by sending my email to this email address, like:  545@alfresco.com.
But it is somewhat nicer to be able to send to an email address that is easier to remember than just a number.

To create an alias for the Email ID numeric, you need to first add an aspect to the folder.
Run Action -> Add Aspect to Item. Select the "Email alias" aspect.
The property "Email Alias" is now available. By selecting edit for the properties, you can define an alias for the submit email name. For example, I can use 'inbox'. Note that the name you select is case sensitive. After doing that, I can submit emails to populate the folder associated with the alias name, like: inbox@alfresco.com.

Step 5 – Add localhost.com to the Windows hosts file.
c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
127.0.0.1 localhost
127.0.0.1 localhost.com

Step6: Configure your email client with IMAP protpcol and given above given domain.
Step7: Send email to EmailInbox@alfresco.com will post email to Alfresco Repository into above mentioned folder.

Hope this help,

Best Regards,
Hetal Patel