Email to Case

[chewie]

Hello all.

I've got SugarCRM setup in a test environment, running the latest SugarCRM 5.2.0h, apache2.0.63 and php v5.25 with cURL enabled, on Windows Server 2003 R2 and have not been able to get the email to case system working.

My expectation and understanding is, once an account has been setup to check a particular email account, it should be pulling in the emails and creating accounts/tagging emails to existing accounts, correct?

This is the functionality I need if I am to move away from Salesforce.

Essentially right now I am cloning my existing Salesforce setup in SugarCRM and this is really holding me back.

[matthew]

Make sure the monitored email box has been set up in admin> inbound email > monitor new account
Ensure that it has Action == "create case"

There are two scenarios to consider.

1. Initial Email creates case
2. Subsequent emails need to be associated with the case

In order to complete #1, you need to use a workflow or a logic hook. If you're planning on using SugarCRM community edition, it will have to be a logic hook (see: http://www.sugarcrm.com/wiki/index.p...le=Logic_Hooks). With workflow, you can create a related record with each email. I worked as consultant for SugarCRM for awhile and also in support. I generally recommended against creating cases per email, since you can have spam creating cases. I try to tell clients to use the self-serve portal.

To achieve #2, it's simply have the correct macro in the subject line. By default the macro looks like this: [CASE:323] That will work perfectly to associating the email. You should have an account associated with every case (it's required). If the email sender's address matches that on the account email, it will associate to the account.

[matthew]

PS: Support is very good at instructing people on how to achieve this.

[davidcosine]

Make sure the monitored email box has been set up in admin> inbound email > monitor new account
Ensure that it has Action == "create case"

There are two scenarios to consider.

1. Initial Email creates case
2. Subsequent emails need to be associated with the case

Matt said: In order to complete #1, you need to use a workflow or a logic hook. If you're planning on using SugarCRM community edition, it will have to be a logic hook (see: http://www.sugarcrm.com/wiki/index.p...le=Logic_Hooks). With workflow, you can create a related record with each email. I worked as consultant for SugarCRM for awhile and also in support. I generally recommended against creating cases per email, since you can have spam creating cases. I try to tell clients to use the self-serve portal.

David Kosy replies: In order to complete #1.

This exists out of the box in all Sugar editions.

admin> inbound email setup> monitor new inbox > action > create case

1. All new emails to this address will create a new case. Spam will create a new case (pitfall)
2. If the email address of the sender is your email address of an account in Sugar, that account will automatically be associated with the case.

This is the subject of a kb article: (with much better detail!)
http://kb.sugarcrm.com/featured/auto...inbound-email/

I also see you said this:

My expectation and understanding is, once an account has been setup to check a particular email account, it should be pulling in the emails and creating accounts/tagging emails to existing accounts, correct?

If you follow the above guide then:

Create Case: yes
Create Account: no
Relate Account to Case: Yes If existing account has the email address from which case was created *already associated with the account*

Note: No Contact Relationship is associated during this process.

If your support agent manually associates a contact record AND you are using Sugar Pro or Enterprise you can then create workflows using Sugar to notify the customer when case status changes or a note has been added to a case.

Setting up workflow to notify a contact associated to a case whenever the case status changes
http://kb.sugarcrm.com/app/workflows...tatus-changes/

How to email a customer when a note has been added to a case through Sugar
http://kb.sugarcrm.com/app/workflows...through-sugar/

Note here that [CASE:1234] macro works in all versions including CE.

If you have an existing case 1234 and you leave the Case Macro setting as it stands in sugar:

You can email your inbound email address with [CASE:1234] in the subject line and a new case will not be created but the email will be added to the case in history.

"How to email a customer when a note has been added to a case through Sugar" KB article: Expands on this in Pro or Enterprise Sugar.

To confirm what Matt said: auto case creation creates a case from any email which causes trouble if you get spam to that email address. In practice using Sugar I manually create cases from Sugar, manually add the contact, and manually add the account. This is time consuming but more accurate.

Thanks;
David Kosy

[chewie]

I still cannot get this to work.

I have followed all directions to get this 'out of the box' functionality working, yet, it does not.

Looking at the scheduler:

Job function:ollMonitoredInboxes Status Active
Date & Time Start 01/01/2005 07:30am Active From Always
Date & Time End perpetual Active To Always
Last Successful Run Never Interval As often as possible.
Execute If Missed Never
Date Created: 08/25/2009 04:48pm by Last Modified: 08/25/2009 04:48pm by admin
====

why is that?

I've even just installed a stack installer for testing on my own workstation to rule out config, apache, php, etc errors and yet the results are the same.

If this is supposed to be working out of the box...

[matthew]

can you go to you sugarcrm instance like this

http://yourserver.com/sugarcrm/cron.php

You should see a white page, but then you should go check the the scheduler and look at the "last successful run" and you should see something.

if you don't, then you need to go into php.ini and make sure that error_reporting is turned on and you should probably turn display_errors = On and also watch the apache error log (/var/log/httpd/error.log)

[chewie]

It works if I:

a) restart apache or the stack(s)
and
b) then hit the cron page

But it only reads the email and does not appear to dump it into the trash bin...

I had exepected that once the email is processed that it gets moved to another folder.

Also why would this only work once the cron page is hit?

[chewie]

Anyone?

I can't figure out why Cron is not working.

Apache is not reporting any errors.

[chewie]

Could it be due to running this on Windows?

I just realized that the system may have been nominally configured for use on *nix which has a built in cron manager...do I have to setup a scheduler to open up iexplorer and hit the cron page every so often?

[matthew]

@chewie-

The reason why it worked when you hit the cron.php file is b/c that must be called by the operating system's scheudler. In Unix it is cron, in Windows it is Schedule Tasks.

You also need to make sure you specify explicitly the PHP executable in Scheduled Tasks

so like;

C:\Windows\PHP\php.exe -f C:\inetpub\wwwroot\sugarcrm\cron.php

Check this out: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/308569

Set the schedule task to run every minute or so.