CloudMailIn.com Testing Thread

Jaymer

This seems like a great idea.
Instead of finicky/traditional email protocol, let someone else manage the email and post something to your application when the email arrives.
I’m testing a node.JS server to get such posts.

Thought I would create this thread so that we can all collaborate and test out this novel approach to emails.

Jaymer

(Reserved)

Jaymer

Took me about an hour (with testing), maybe 1.5, to get CloudMailIn (CMI) working.
I used JSON with REST structures.
NOTE: I was going to do Node.js, since I already have a js server running, but it really was faster to do it in Aware. now if there was lots of volume then maybe Node.JS handles it faster than Aware. dunno)

Dealing with the Time field is tricky cause it has time zone offset in it.
And the demo JSON file has a element "plain" which led me to believe its a plain text version of the email HTML field - that its auto calculated.
But turns out if I send a regular email it comes in HTML and the "plain" field is null. Thats a bummer because I'm thinking of not storing or presenting the HTML inside the CRM for replies. (but thats just us on this specific app).

I used PostMan to test their sample file and my data structure, to make sure I was unpacking fields I needed.
I didn't need attachments - simple stuff for now.

Recovery is always going to be an issue with whatever system you have running.
If Aware hangs, server reboots, etc., then CMI will just retry later. Their dashboard will let you know if your gateway is down and msgs are hung, so it doesn't look like you'll miss any emails. Nice
(more about this in next post on Aware Incoming Email)

The free signup account lets you actually start posting msgs to Aware.
They generate you a dummy email address (ie. 123234324223@cloudmailin.com), so when that comes into Aware, you have to set that as an address of someone in your CRM so you can attach that incoming email to a real record.
Once you pay $25/mo, you get 'real' email addresses at your own domain.

Overall, seems like its a nice service.
(continues next post)

Jaymer

So this got me wondering the "WHY" part... WHY do we need an outside non-Aware service when Aware says it handles incoming email.

Like Mark, I've had sketchy results in the past.
The Docs mentioned something about "Since v5.7, Aware .....".
Well, Since V7, Aware offered a way to handle additional Email Accounts.

You have the initial hardcoded mail server info in the BSV (by double-clicking on the BSV name).
You can alternatively place this info in SystemSettings (a more flexible option than hardcoded in the BSV at least).

Then users needed the ability to send from more than 1 outgoing address. Both aforementioned methods allowed only 1 login username to the mail server. So if you needed emails to come from "Info@Acme.com" and "Renewals@Acme.com", that was handled by the new Right-click on the Business Objects Element and you could add a new Outgoing Email Account table and create as many accounts as you needed.

So all the outgoing stuff was pretty straightforward (once you figured it out).
But Incoming was finicky - and I think a few years back a strategy was to, using the Scheduler, to frequently disconnect & reconnect to the Mail Server (I thought this was a method to reduce issues if incoming stopped working, but I may be wrong.)

Anyway, tonight I set up a connection to a outlook.office365.com and started polling for incoming messages.
I ran across several issues - mostly related to what really is the incoming server name (there's Outlook, Outlook for Office 365, Business accts, etc etc). DDumas said he used TLS, but mine didn't work until SSL.
Eventually I was hitting the server.
One big difference is the 'recovery' I mentioned before:
Aware reads an email from Outlook - Outlook marks it read.
Aware has a Rules error and doesn't create the db record.
Email "might" be lost. (It might still be on server - its the POP vs IMAP thing).
In my case the 2 test emails were still there, but had been marked read.
Changing them to UNREAD didn't make them get loaded by Aware.
Not until a new email did Aware see it. So there's a diff. between Unread and New.
And if something happens and your users say they haven't gotten emails all day, and something was crapping out in a rule processing the email, then you're gonna have a tough time getting all those emails in - even though they are still on the server - maybe there's a way to do it, dunno.

I'll leave it running for a while and keep sending emails to see if I can break it. I DO NOT have any Scheduler code to DISC/RECONNECT.

Jaymer

I turned in a bug report - I can't see any Notification Rules being processed in the Log.
Thats where you're going to get an error (parsing the input data) - and it doesn't appear to show up anywhere.

I just sent an Aware-handled email and didn't even see a notice in Tomcat or Server that it was being received. So the only feedback you have that its working is seeing live data appear.

Contrast that with CMI sending JSON data via REST and you see ALL of that data appear in Tomcat log. So you know its working, although lots of emails will really flood that display.