Need help with getting automated email import to work

[apinstein]

I am trying to get the automated email importing working.

I have looked in docs and in the forums, but I can't seem to find an authoritative explanation of best practices.

Right now, I have Sugar connecting via IMAP to my email. Ideally, I'd like Sugar to monitor my "Inbox" and "Sent Items" folders, and automatically import any emails that match any existing email contact, and "link" them so that I see these emails when on those contacts/accounts/leads/etc.

However, if the above requires importing ALL emails, that seems like it could get out of hand (not all the email I do should be in Sugar....).

In this case, I'd be willing to set up a separate email account, and just CC that email whenever I want a particular email imported to Sugar. My sales guys are BEGGING me for some kind of automation here. It's horribly tedious to force people to use the built-in Sugar Webmail when they're used to using Outlook, Blackberries, and iPhones.

Also, I have tried to set things up according to this thread but it doesn't seem to work. I have 2 questions about that:

1) What is a group folder and why do I need to use it to automatically import messaging? In the docs group folders are described as for "distribution of emails to group members" so it really doesn't make sense.
2) I have set up the cron.php to run, but it isn't happy. It oom's (I adjusted memory_limit), and also it suffers several warnings/bugs:

PHP Notice: Undefined offset: 6 in /opt/www/domains/sugar.tourbuzz.net/sugar_www/include/TimeDate.php on line 308
PHP Notice: Undefined offset: 6 in /opt/www/domains/sugar.tourbuzz.net/sugar_www/include/TimeDate.php on line 314

and in sugarcrm.log:

Fri Jun 6 23:20:59 2008,249 [1640] FATAL SugarCRM - If you see a whole string of these, there is a chance someone is attacking your system.

So, really I have no idea what's going on here.

I am a very experienced sysadmin and php developer, so I am sure I can get it working if I just have some idea of how Sugar tries to this...

Please advise!

Thanks,
Alan

[jslosberg]

Were you able to get this to work. For me, the key is only importing the emails, from both inbox and sent, that have matching contacts in the system. The idea of having a separate email address that people need to cc is tedious and prone to error.

--Jared

[apinstein]

No, I wasn't. I spoke to someone at Sugar, and the only way to import emails is manually. This can be done either in the SugarCRM webmail interface in the Community Edition, or via the Outlook/Thunderbird plugin in the Professional versions.

I was told that it worked like this on purpose, so that not ALL emails would be copied into SugarCRM. "Too much noise", which I guess is a valid point.

I think that the CC thing will be fine though. I don't find it too onerous. I am going to try to write some scripts to make this work.

[Laurena281]

Were you able to figure out how to set up sugarcrm to automatically import email information?

I'm trying to figure out how to get the replies with cases in the subject field to update the case history so our team always has the latest updated information in the case file. Yes, I do know they can be imported into the case manually. But I would like to take that responsibility away from the individual customer support personnel.

There are loads of crm's that do this without configuration, so am surprised that I have to do anything to make this happen.

FWI - I have the on-demand sugarcrm pro package.