External mail client and emailing outside the web interface

[bucketoftruth]

I've got SugarCRM set up and running great. I'm testing it out as a ticket tracking platform to manage answers and solutions internal to our organization. It appear to have this capability entirely as far as my testing has determined. The problem I'm running into is that I don't want users to be restricted to the web interface. I'd like to leverage our IMAP server which provides virtual shared folders and Maildir ACLs to share them.

At present I have aliases configured for each customer to send to (i.e. customer@support) which goes into the mailbox queue@support. Each customer has their own address to send to and all email goes into a central queue which Sugar users pick from or are assigned to. From there, Sugar users must use the web interface exclusively to exchange emails with the customer. If they so much as open their desktop email client and read a message there it will never appear in Sugar's interface.

While Sugar's interface is very nice, it's still limiting in as much as it's not as fast or powerful as a full featured IMAP desktop mail client. I noticed that there is an option when configuring Sugar user's email settings to set Email Client to "external mail client". I have this hope that if I were to configure Sugar differently I could leverage this setting to my advantage and free my users from having to use the Sugar web interface exclusively.

Any pointers?

BTW, this is my first question here. I got all the basic stuff worked out thanks to the excellent work done on Sugar to make it easy as pie to set up and configure. If this question belongs elsewhere, please move it if you're a mod.

-Scott

[invisik]

Hi,

This is a good question that I'd also like more info about. I have noticied, if you keep the [CASE:xxx] in the subject line (or add it manually when sending mail in another mail client) it will keep the replies attached to the case. The messages you send out from the external mail client are not logged in Sugar, however. Scrolling down in the customer replies does (kinda) allow you to see what your employee sent out.

Not 100% foolproof, but handy if you can't get into Sugar (I use my BlackBerry a lot).

Maybe if you BCC yourself on outgoing messages it might save it with the history......

-m

[bucketoftruth]

I should also mention that selecting IMAP as the Sugar user's mail protocol causes the INBOX to been emptied when checked, more like POP3 functionality. Even if I check the box "Leave message on server" it will erase the message once Sugar sees it. The reverse is the case if I check the mailbox using Thunderbird before Sugar does... Sugar doesn't see the message for import. I'm inclined to think this is a bug and will report it in that forum as well unless this is somehow by design.

invisik said:
Maybe if you BCC yourself on outgoing messages it might save it with the history......

BCC'ing the customer account works with one little hitch.... since I use aliases for each customer which deliver to queue@support the reply emails go into the unanswered queue. However, they automatically associate with the proper case if the subject is preserved and can then be sorted. If there was a way to automatically move them out of the incoming queue that would nearly solve my dilemma.