IMAP working, but...

[andreas_wilmsme]

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 the Alfresco IMAP folders corresponding to my document library. In Outlook this object is listed as an Email with subject line, and shown in Email format. In Alfresco Share, it is listed with a meaningless technical name, such as "message_501.eml" and there is no preview available.
==> Question: How can I make Alfresco show the subject line instead of the technical document name? Or how can I make Alfresco actually use the subject as the document name? Would there be a way to preview the "eml" document in Alfresco share?

Documents I stored in an Alfresco document library are shown in Outlook with just the meta data (title, author, dates, …).
==> Is there a way to have the actual document attached to the "virtual" Email shown in Outlook?

I am pretty new to Alfresco and completely new to its IMAP support, so any help greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance,
Andreas

[mrogers]

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.

[mikef]

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.

[mrogers]

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

[andreas_wilmsme]

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

[andreas_wilmsme]

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

[mrogers]

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.

[aborba]

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

[samuel_penn]

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.

[samuel_penn]

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.