Tag: email agent

Log Email using your mail application (such as Outlook)

October 11, 2010 A while ago I posted about using email with Dovetail/Clarify. One of the items I talked about is the Enhanced Email Out functionality within Dovetail Agent, which is a client-side integration with your MS Outlook client. This allows users to access their address books, attach files to the outgoing email, use your signature, read/delivery receipts, etc. The way this is accomplished in via Collaborative Data Objects (CDO), a Microsoft library that exposes the interfaces of the Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI). There area few downsides of using CDO, including the need to install CDO on each desktop, Outlook warnings/restrictions, and troubles with Office 2010. It’s not really a surprise – having a web application be able to access your Outlook application has the potential for security trouble. Use your mail client An alternative to this is to simply pop open a…

How To Setup hMailServer To Use a SSL Certificate

August 17, 2010 I am adding IMAP support to one of our products. Likely more that one person out there a needed to do this, so enjoy. I’ll take you from creating an SSL certificate to configuring hMailServer to work with both secure and regular connections to testing your setup. Creating a Self Signed SSL Certificate First things first you’ll need to download OpenSSL. I downloaded the 64bit 1.0 light version which required Visual C++ 2008 Redistributables (x64) to be installed first. I told the installer to put OpenSSL in my c:utilites folder. Create a Key Next up you’ll need to create a key. I recommend you replace <host> with your machine name. >openssl genrsa -out <host>.key 1024 Certificate Request Now you need to create a certificate request. This is the file you normally send…

Avoid Mickey Mouse Email Loops

January 12, 2009 Say you have an application (i.e. bot, script, automaton, service) polling an email account (POP3 or IMAP) for emails. And say that your application sends an automated response back to the sender of the email. Be careful. You can easily get into situations that will create an email loop or worse yet the Sorcerer’s Apprentice Syndrome. After sending email from an automaton it is quite common for the receiving mail servers to bounce emails back or accounts to temporarily respond with an “Out of Office” response. If your service is not smart enough to ignore automated responses to it’s own emails? Well. The streams will cross and poorly written email services will implode under the weight of your unending email loop. Kittens die. System administrators call you. This is bad. RFC 3834 comes to the rescue with…

hMailServer: a free email server that’s great for demos and testing

December 3, 2008 When doing testing or demos, I often need to send and receive email. For example, Dovetail EmailAgent requires a mail server for receiving incoming mail. Dovetail Rulemanager needs a mail server for sending outgoing notifications by email, as well as for sending outgoing email. When I'm in the office, I could use our corporate mail server (although I don't like to use production systems for testing). If I have internet access, I can use GMail, or another free hosted SMTP/POP3 server. But when I'm on the road, its not uncommon to end up in a conference room somewhere without internet access. So I prefer to have everything I need loaded on my laptop - and this includes a mail server. hMailServer hMailServer is a free email server that's great for demos and testing. I've been using it for teh last 6 months or…

Email Agent 1.5 Heads Up

September 19, 2008 This post is for my readers who are Dovetail Email Agent customers. We are getting ready to release Email Agent 1.5 which contains some breaking changes that Gary Sherman has already posted about. I wanted to give our customers a heads up of what has changed to facilitate upgrade planning. Below is a draft of the “What’s New” from Version 1.5 this may change so remember to check your local listings for more details. Breaking Changes Email Agent now logs "Email In" events to a case rather than logging a note. This change will mainly affect customers using our Rule Manager product having business rules that are setup to fire on "Log Notes" events, in particular those that are meant to capture "Log Notes" events created by Email Agent. Affected business rules should be changed to include a start event…

Proposal for a change to EmailAgent

September 10, 2008 We're considering a change to Dovetail EmailAgent, and wanted to float it by our users to see if anyone had any concerns or objections. Currently, when EmailAgent adds more information to a case, it actually performs a Log Note action. Clarify has a "Email In" activity, but we don't currently use that. This is odd. EmailAgent also creates attachments for any files that were attached to the email. One of the issues is that there is no relationship between the notes (notes_log) and the attachments (doc_inst), so it can be difficult to determine exactly which attachments were for which email. Why Log Notes? History, mostly. We don't have an "Email In" API in ClearBasic - which is the language that our original email processing engine was written in (it was then called SuperEmailClerk). So, the "Log Notes" API was used…

Having a voicemail create a case in our Dovetail/Clarify system

March 7, 2008 We recently moved into new offices here at Dovetail, and with our new offices came a new phone system.One of the features of the phone system is that we can get an email whenever we get a voicemail. The email contains a WAV file of the actual voicemail recording. This allows us to easily be notified of, and receive voicemails, even when we're out of the office.The same rule applies to voicemails left on our support mailbox. So, if one of our customers calls our support line and leaves a voicemail message, we can get an email alerting us, along with the WAV file of the message.This is all well and good.But many of us are not on email all the time, and we have other notifications setup using Rulemanager, such as notifications to our mobile devices, and notifications via…