FAQ: Inbound Email - Daily Use Issues [v1.3] Cleaning My Inbox

[sugarchris]

Please feel free to respond, adding issues you've encountered or solutions you've come up with =).


DAILY USE ISSUES

My Inbox is FULL! And I don't want to delete everything just to empty it!

This is a tough one and it called for a feature/bug fix to get "working."

I've implemented a light-weight feature that allows your users to "Archive" (a la, Outlook) emails once they are done with them. If you have a history built up for a given Case, and that Case is closed, your user can (in their "My Inbox" view) select all the relevant emails and press the "Archive" button.

This feature will debut in 4.0.1. (no one more than I like a tidy Inbox - sorry I missed this one!)

Why can't [Sugar] just have a button that checks email when the user wants to?

The philosophy behind this is to minimize the load on your sales/support/etc teams, and have the Inbounds appear auto-magically. This saves them time, and makes Sugar a better investment for your company (of course, this assuming its up and running ).

Error in Logs: Fatal: Job Firing pollMonitoredInboxes

Mea culpa! I left that set to "fatal" when developing (so I could tell which jobs were firing when!). I've assigned a bug to myself, and it will be fixed in the next patch release.

If this is really bugging you, you can fix it yourself very easily.
Edit modules/SchedulersJobs/SchedulersJob.php line ~78. Change:

 $GLOBALS['log']->fatal('----->Updating Job Status and finishing Job execution.'); 
  

To:

 $GLOBALS['log']->debug('----->Updating Job Status and finishing Job execution.'); 
  

And in the same file, ~108 change:

 $GLOBALS['log']->fatal('----->JOB firing '.$func); 
  

To:

 $GLOBALS['log']->debug('----->JOB firing '.$func); 
  

:

Inbound Email is SLOW!!!!!
There could be hundreds of reasons for this, but among the ones we can address directly:

1. Use IMAP instead of POP3.
2. If using POP3, uncheck "Leave Messages On Server". This switch requires the system to compare every email in the POP3 mailbox to every Inbound in the Sugar system. If you have 1000 saved emails in the mailbox, and you want just the 1 new one, Sugar is forced to dupe check all 1000 emails when polling because POP3 does not allow flags like "Read" or "Seen." It assumes you delete them when you retrieve new mail.
3. Use IMAP instead of POP3.
4. Use IMAP instead of POP3. No really. It's MUCH better.

Issue - reply tracking:
When an email is taken into Sugar, it will initially be assigned with a status of "Unread." If a rep opens it for reading, it will be assigned a status of "Read." If/when the rep actually composes AND sends a reply, the initial email will be assigned as status of "Replied." This functionality will address the unprofessional double reply bit, as well as allow a group of reps to field inbound emails seamlessly.

Issue - multiple emails from multiple addresses:
When setting up I-E for the first time, a "Group User" is created - this user can be thought of as a queue mechanism. If you create more than one I-E instance, they can all map to the initial group user, and transparently queue inbounds from multiple accounts. If your company fields inbounds from accounts like "info@" or "support@", they may all be queued to the single group user, and when replied to by a rep, the outbound will have the from name and from address that you assigned (such as "SugarCRM Support <support@sugarcrm.com>").

Issue - tracking what was said to the [potential} customer:
If the [potential] customer exists in the system, such as when you "Create a Lead" from an inbound email, all in/outbound communication is tracked and linked to that customer - this is done fully automatically . Once that customer exists, the rep can view its communication history by viewing the Lead/Case/Account/Bug detail view and scrolling to the History subpanel. A future item I am currently fleshing out is conversation threading, so you can look forward to that in a subsequent release.

[emanresu]

Using Sugar Scheduler to set up an new schedule I get the message

Missing Required Field: Start Date whether I have 1 day or Every Day.

Running a Clean install on Apache and PHP 4.2

[sugarchris]

Hi emanresu,

My guess is the default date that should be set (today's date) isn't.

The workaround to get the scheduler working is to click on "Advanced Options" and set a Start Date if it's blank. After that, you can click back to "Basic Options" and set it to poll every minute or whatever interval is appropriate for your system.

Hope this sorts you out!

[Paul N]

Hi Chris

I have Sugar installed on a RHEL 4.0 update 2 system, PHP 4.3.9, MySQL 4.14, Apache 2.052, Dovecot IMAP, external POP3, php-imap is installed, path to php in cronjob is set... fetchmail is running to get mail from external server to internal.

I have tried a number of things to get the emails to work in Sugar, but they are not getting into Sugar. It can send emails, but no receive.

Tried both methods...

POP3 with external server, test settings are ok,
IMAP server internally works ok, (even squirrelmail works fine)

The output from the cron.php is a few Array statements so this leads me to believe the pollmailboxes is not working...

Any ideas would be appreciated.

cheers
paul

[sugarchris]

Hi Paul,

Sounds like you have a working copy - one detail I'd like to know is: are the other methods of testing email using the same account? This is especially pertinent with IMAP as many clients will mark messages as "Seen" when downloading the headers - effectively making them invisible to Sugar.

If you run POP3 tests, are you leaving those messages on the server?

The array output is actually a success message of sorts - it means the job is being run. You will be able to see if the Scheduler is polling your mailboxes if you go to the Schduler screen and then select the job set up for polling inbounds (OOB, it's called "Check Inbound Mailboxes"). Underneath the details of the job will be a subpanel listing all the jobs it's expecting to run for the next 24 hours, probably around 1400+ if you left the interval alone.

All the jobs in the past should have a staus of "Not Run" or "Completed" if the scheduler is running as designed. If you see "Failed", you are having problems.

The fetchmail process you have setup - is there a reason Sugar can't go direct to that mailbox?

[MSchroettle]

Hello Chris

First of all with all the hints in the forums and with what I found in the manual, I got incoming mail to work fine with IMAP.
Got two questions with inbound email on 4.0GA:

1) If I understand this correctly, inbound email is thought to be a group thing and not meant to go to the individual user's mailbox?? pls confirm.
On the other hand, what would be required to have the freedom to choose how incoming mails should be treated?
You have groups and teams and so I would think that if I assign an inmail box to a private team (which is only possible if you edit the database entry at this time) it would then show up in the user's in mail - but that's not the case.
So here is my question: What else has to be done to get this to work? What do I need to tweak so that I can have incoming mail for private mail addresses directly to the user - and on the other hand use the group feature for adresses like support@ or info@?? any hints?

2) When the incoming mail is not plaintext but HTML then sugar shows only garbage, i.e. I can see the mime code when I click on alt text, but don't see anything at all in the detailview window. Also any non ascii characters on the subject line are also garbled... Somewhere in the back of my head I think that we had seen this one before - not sure where though??

thank you for your help...
Michael

Oh, and I almost forgot:
In the admin area - mass email manager I cannot see the view sent emails button on the shortcuts panel - It is gone ...
So I don't have any possibilty to view sent emails... Pls tell me where I have to look for a solution...

[Paul N]

Hi Chris

Thanks for replying to my post so quickly...

I have changed my settings to leave the mail on the IMAP server and will continue testing. I believe I did this when I tested POP3 as well.

Just noticed that you logged this bug 3914 so sounds like this is the issue - I am running Sugar on HTTPS port 443.

I will enable port 80 and do some more testing.

Cheers
paul

[sugarchris]

1) If I understand this correctly, inbound email is thought to be a group thing and not meant to go to the individual user's mailbox?? pls confirm.

Correct. Other 3rd party modules can handle private email (such as ZuckerMail).

On the other hand, what would be required to have the freedom to choose how incoming mails should be treated?
You have groups and teams and so I would think that if I assign an inmail box to a private team (which is only possible if you edit the database entry at this time) it would then show up in the user's in mail - but that's not the case.
So here is my question: What else has to be done to get this to work? What do I need to tweak so that I can have incoming mail for private mail addresses directly to the user - and on the other hand use the group feature for adresses like support@ or info@?? any hints?

You're on the right track - the "hacky" way to do this is to create 1-person teams, then have that particular inbound mailbox assign all mails to that Public, but 1-person team. Private teams are actually coded against when i build the Inbox view queries.

I wouldn't go too crazy on this. The initial 0.1a cut of InboundEmail included the potential to have private + public/group emails. Some of the folks on the review committee thought it was too much to ship, so i had to change the code. Now that we're getting a lot of feedback from people like yourself, we're considering making it a shippable for 4.x.

2) When the incoming mail is not plaintext but HTML then sugar shows only garbage, i.e. I can see the mime code when I click on alt text, but don't see anything at all in the detailview window. Also any non ascii characters on the subject line are also garbled... Somewhere in the back of my head I think that we had seen this one before - not sure where though??

Hmm. This sounds like a bug. Could you be VERY specific about how this came about, including what email client sent the mail in the first place, what email server received it, what protocol was used to retrieve it, and any other details you can think of will help. Also, is it localized to 1 person? 1 client site?

All of my testing was successful with rich/HTML emails. It was limited to Outlook, Outlook Express, Entourage (os X outlook), SquirrelMail, Mail (apple's client), and of course Sugar's outbound email capabilities.

In the admin area - mass email manager I cannot see the view sent emails button on the shortcuts panel - It is gone ...
So I don't have any possibilty to view sent emails... Pls tell me where I have to look for a solution...

I didn't develop email marketing so I don't have a clue... maybe post a new thread in the pro help forum?

[sugarchris]

Hi Chris

Thanks for replying to my post so quickly...

I have changed my settings to leave the mail on the IMAP server and will continue testing. I believe I did this when I tested POP3 as well.

Just noticed that you logged this bug 3914 so sounds like this is the issue - I am running Sugar on HTTPS port 443.

I will enable port 80 and do some more testing.

Cheers
paul

Yep. I hope that sorts you out until we can get non-standard ports working for the Schedulers module. Sorry about that.

[Paul N]

Hi Chris

Just tried port 80 only to IMAP and still no emails, the jobs show as running with the Array statements etc... test settings work fine to IMAP, it finds all the mailboxes.

Why is there a status of Ready and Not Run - should they not be Ready and Executed/Passed/or something more meaningful ?

Maybe this is the reason, eventhough the jobs seem to be running, the status shows up as Readyor Not Run ?

-paul