Another inbound email server issue

[jsabah]

Hi everyone,

Very new to the world of Electronic Document Management, I am trying to get Alfresco CE 3.3 (nightly build) to work in my company. Not being a Network/System admin, I am currently struggling on 2 different points of the configuration of the application. In this topic, I will focus on the Inbound email server configuration.
Alfresco is installed on a Windows XP 64 workstation with plenty of RAM & HD. We have an Exchange server and thus Active Directory.
Reading the wiki and the forum didn't help much as I don't have a single clue on what is going on with this setup. Clearly, I lack technical knowledge on this topic. Sorry about that.

I would like to send emails directly to Alfresco repository with the following scenario :
I create a space for a specific project. I add an Email Alias to that space and I want the email sent to that alias to appear and be stored in Alfresco. But I don't know how to configure the different files.
In alfresco-global.properties, I have:

# 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

In custom-email-server.properties extracted in C:\Alfresco\tomcat\webapps\alfresco\WEB-INF\classes\alfresco\extension, I have:

# 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
# The username to authenticate as when the sender address is not recognised
#email.inbound.unknownUser=anonymous

# Email Server properties 
email.server.enabled=true
email.server.port=25
email.server.domain=alfresco.com

# 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=.*

# A comma separated list of email REGEX patterns of blocked senders.
# If the sender email address matches this then the message will be rejected.
# For example:
#   .*\@hotmail\.com, .*\@googlemail\.com
#email.server.blocked.senders=‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

I understand that this is not in the scope of Alfresco, so I address this topic to the community rather than Alfresco engineers. If someone with the necessary patience could explain me in a step-by-step tutorial how to configure Alfresco and the Exchange server to get this to work, I would be extremely thankful !

Many thanks in advance,

Jonathan

[_sax]

First, there should be no other mail server running on the machine running Alfresco. netstat on the command line should display only Alfresco (maybe named 'java') as listening on port 25 which is your port for receiving mail.
So make sure, that no windows service is interfering with this port.

Additionally, when you like to adress the Alfresco server, you have to establish a mail alias inside your intranet, that your exchange server knows. So there should be a mapping for your Alfresco server's IP to it's intranet DNS name, i.e. (@)dms-alfresco.com
If this is out of scope you can take the server's IP for a first try: alfresco_folder@xxx.yyy.zzz.

Not to be forgotten is the ability to send mails to Alfresco. Only users of the group EMAIL_CONTRIBUTORS are allowed to send mail to Alfresco.
So you have to add yourself to that group, but this user has to have the mail adress in its profile, that your sending from.

Then you can try to use the folder's DBID, if the mail alias is not working. See http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Display_Object_DBID for more.
With a confuration like 123@xxx.yyy.zzz there should be some activity or error message coming from Alfresco that gets you further.

[jsabah]

Thanks _sax for this quick reply.

With my user added to the EMAIL_CONTRIBUTORS, I can receive an email sent to my user node with the following recipient : DBID@IPA.DD.RE.SS. Then the email is stored as 2 files, one in RTF format and the other is HTML.

But when I try to send an email to Alfresco and have it attached to a document, whether I send it to document DBID@IPA.DD.RE.SS or EMAIL_ALIAS@IPA.DD.RE.SS, I get the following error :

14:18:53,946  ERROR [node.integrity.IntegrityChecker] Found 1 integrity violations:
The association child multiplicity has been violated:
   Source Node: workspace://SpacesStore/d7c597f5-b340-49ec-adcc-089285cf188c
   Association: Association[ class=ClassDef[name={http://www.alfresco.org/model/forum/1.0}discussable], name={http://www.alfresco.org/model/forum/1.0}discussion, target class={http://www.alfresco.org/model/forum/1.0}forum, source role=null, target role=null]
   Required child Multiplicity: 1..1
   Actual child Multiplicity: 2‍‍‍‍‍‍

An other example. I modify the details of a site called Projects, I run an action and I add an aspect to the item which is "Email Alias". I modify the properties of the item and I set "projects" as the email alias. I don't see any trace in Tomcat but I receive the following error message :

      projects@IPA.DD.RE.SS on 2/09/2009 2:54 PM
            There was a SMTP communication problem with the recipient's email server.  Please contact your system administrator.
            <mail.domain.com.au #5.5.0 smtp;554 Email message handler was not found for node type 'st:site'.>
‍‍‍‍

Could it be that the node DBID is not unique or is it something else ?

Thanks again !

Jonathna

[mikeh]

I believe inbound email currently only works to nodes of type cm:content.

Thanks,
Mike

[_sax]

Regarding your first trial, I am not even able to add the mailable aspect to a discussion (forum).
But the error message seems to say, that it is indeed not possible (maybe, that is why there is no action menu available for discussion spaces).

Regarding sites, it may be feasible to just add a folder in the document library folder of the site, which is of type cm:content and is therefore able to receive mails: Site X/document library/The root folder with a fitting description.

[jsabah]

Thanks again _sax, it does work.

I successfully sent emails to a folder within my project space using the node or the email alias.

After reading the Message Handling by Target Node Type it does make more sense.

Thank you for your help !

[_sax]

Thank you for referencing the manual! As it seems, discussions are able to receive mails (but how to apply the mailable aspect?).
Did you pursue that further?
If that works, then how do mails with both, text and html "versions" of the content get handled? Where are attachments getting stored?
Maybe that is why, there is no action link?