Auto-archive emails using bcc from any mail client

[stevenjohn]

Hi there,

I wondered if anyone could advise me here. We use sugar but dont want to use the email client in it, we like to use our normal clients here - however, it means you are often copy/pasting mails into sugar.

I realise there are some plugins for say outlook, but this is not the way I'd like to go. A really great and easy solution for me would be this:

1. Any email you want to be put into a sugar account you simply bcc to sugar_archiver@mydomain.com
2. A cron on sugar polls this address, when it finds a mail it uses the email domain of the person you sent it to try to match it to the contacts within an account
3. If it finds a match to an account it then adds the email as an archived email/note in that account

That way as we are sending mails out to clients/prospects we can easily have them selectively archived into sugar in the background.

Does anyone know ofg a way to do this?

Many thanks, Steve

[sitesme]

I was also looking for this feature, mostly the ability to BCC to a specific email address all the time, it is something that I'm really looking for.

any idea how to do this?

[stevenjohn]

I cant imagine the script would be that complicated - and I think sugar used to auto add emails previously, so maybe some of the script already exists.

It does seem to me like the easiest was of letting all users who dont want to use a slow web based email client but do want auto archiving of the mails THEY WANT to autoarchive into accounts...

Am surprised noone else is keen on this (apart from Sitesme of course!).

Steve

[lethallynx]

Hi there,

It really wouldn't be hard to write a small application that can sit on a server and do this.

The only problem I can see is what to do for the emails that it can't find a contact for in sugar.

You could:
a) put them in a list which someone can come along and manually archive to the correct contact/account/lead.
b) send an email back to the user telling them the email could not be archived because it couldn't find a contact/account/lead (and then keep trying to archive that email every hour).
c) don't bother linking emails to any specific contact/account/lead (because sugar will automatically show the archived email in the History if the contacts email is involved in the archived email).

Lynx

[stevenjohn]

Thanks Lynx.

For us we wouldnt be that bothered, providing most linked up, which they should, then thats fine...

Steve

[blak3r]

I too want this functionality. In salesforce there a few options, one of which is it creates a task for the user who sent the email that says UNRESOLVED EMAIL: <your email subject>.

But, I'd be fine with it just doing nothing with the email right now if the contact didn't exist. We're in the middle of switching and this is a feature we completely overlooked.

Yikes!

[stevenjohn]

Hi there,

Well is there naything we can do to get this written? I dont want to develop it myself, I'm not really a coder and have a business to run.

Happy to chip in with a few people to get someone to code it up for us? Shouldnt be more than a days work for a decent coder from what I can tell?

Steve.

[lethallynx]

I am looking into it.

I have had a play around with creating a windows service as well as a windows forms confiuration tool to configure the service and an installer to install the two. Now that I have figured that out it is simply a matter of finding a tool kit that will allow me to easily connect to a pop3 email server and download emails. Once I have that I can then use a lot of the code from SugarArchiver that handles the archiving of emails.

I was thinking of having two options for configuration at the moment.
1. Archive all emails.
2. Archive only emails that have a matching contact/account/lead/opportunity.

I am extreemly busy at the moment so havn't had much time to put something together

Lynx.

[blak3r]

There are two solutions on sugarforge that may work. Both haven't been updated in a long time but may work for your needs.

http://www.sugarforge.org/projects/archiveie -- PHP Script Run Via Scheduler.
http://www.sugarforge.org/projects/storeit -- Perl with cron.

Both are like 5 years old, have no reviews, and look dead. So, I haven't been desperate enough to try them with v6 yet.

[davidir]

There are two solutions on sugarforge that may work. Both haven't been updated in a long time but may work for your needs.

http://www.sugarforge.org/projects/archiveie -- PHP Script Run Via Scheduler.
http://www.sugarforge.org/projects/storeit -- Perl with cron.

Both are like 5 years old, have no reviews, and look dead. So, I haven't been desperate enough to try them with v6 yet.

I was trying to use the first one, but the tables are different. Actually all incoming mails goes to email_cache and the body loads with the preview event and goes to the cache dir to a file. It could be a nightmare! I'm thinking to desestimate this functionality! Any new ideas?