In case this is useful to someone trying to get mailgate up an running, have a look.

I put this little procedure together so I can reference it later. Based on what's in the book and hda's threads. Running on ubuntu 8.04.

Getting OpenERP to send / receive email using mailgate
1)Start OpenERP server with the smtp flag using an open relay SMTP server. This setting is what allows OpenERP to send out emails.
python openerp-server.py --smtp 172.30.0.10

The above example uses spamtitan on the LAN. My experimentation with SBS was a bit difficult here since you don’t really want to allow open relay. Another possible solution if something like SpamTitan or the ISP’s SMTP server is not available is to install sendmail or a similar program on the OpenERP box and have it relay.

2)Fetchmail – Fetchmail is used to get a copy of emails from the email server and then run an Openerp python script to import/create cases in the system automatically depending on the settings below.
a.Install Fetchmail
i. sudo apt-get install fetchmail

b.create file called fetchmailrc (this should be in the same directory you run fetchmail from)
i. gedit fetchmailrc
ii.File contents:

# fetchmailrc

poll 172.30.0.20 proto imap:

username helpdeskqueue password abc123 mda “/home/colin/openerp-dev/3/addons/crm/scripts/openerp-mailgate/openerp-mailgate.py –u 1 –p admin –s 3 –e helpdeskqueue@company.com –d admin”

iii.File contents explained:
1.The poll command is pointed to your mail server. The proto (short for protocol) can be IMAP or POP depending on what is available.
2.* note – the commands/entries above are all separated by a space
3.username – the email account username
4.password – the email user password
5.mda – flag to pass all the stuff in double quotes to fetchmail and allows the python scripts to run.
6./home/colin/openerp-dev/.... – this is the path to the openerp-mailgate.py file
7.–u 1 -this is the id number of the user in OpenERP that will access the database. Log on to openerp and check this ID field. In this example id 1 is the admin user.
8.–p -this is the password of the openerp user from above
9.–s 3 - s stands for Section. The sections are CRM --> Configuration--> Cases --> Sections. Like the user ID each section has an ID number and this needs to be put here.
10.–e -the email address of the email account
11.–d -the name of the database stored in Postgres

c.Running Fetchmail - keep in mind that this command runs fetchmail once, it's not continuously grabbing emails, but it's enough for testing and to get started.
i.Command syntax –
fetchmail –v –k –f fetchmailrc

ii.Command syntax explained
1.–v this is the verbose flag. This is Optional.
2.–k this makes fetchmail leave a copy of the email fetched on the server. For IMAP this needs to be set but possibly not for POP.
3.–f this tells fetchmail we will be passing a file with additional commands, in this case the file is called fetchmailrc. Actually any file name seems to work.

Sorry about the formatting, this had been cut and pasted from a word doc.

That's it. Now you can send emails to the mailbox you set up above and after running fetchmail OpenERP will automatically create the case in the system
The 'Send Partner & Historize' button will also work providing your smtp server is happy about relaying emails from OpenERP.

I wish I'd seen this post before I waded through the set up on my own.

Anyway, here's another step that I just figured out: rolling over the mailgate.log. It seems like a good idea, because the mailgate dumps a complete copy of every e-mail it sends.

Here's an article on configuring logrotate to roll the logs. I created a file called /etc/logrotate.d/openerp with the following contents:



If this works, I'll probably add entries for the other openerp log files.

I'm running on Ubuntu Intrepid. I've just set this stuff up, so I'll have to wait for a week to make sure things work.

I found this blog post helpful for installing exim4 to forward e-mail from the openerp server to the ISP's SMTP server.

Ignore what I said above about rolling over the logs. I think I must have added the logging as a debugging tool. (Oops.)

One other thing that isn't covered by the posts here is how to make fetchmail run automatically when the server is rebooted. I found this post very helpful. Pay particular attention to the call to update-rc.d, I missed it the first time.

I have an idea...why not just rewrite the mailgate class to be more human like...i mean, just configuring a server, a port a username and a password...like any other sane ERP system...

PD: Many years waiting this...sorry

Could not agree more!! What a joke!!

I'm getting this error when I try to use openerp-mailgate.py



I've modified the script so the default values are the ones I need for testing purposes:



The fetchamilrc:



I just don't know what I'm missing here.
Any help would be appreciated

It looks like that error means that the OpenERP user id and password combination don't match any records in the database. Are you sure that you want user id 2? Usually the admin user is id 1. If you really do mean user id 2, then are you sure that it uses the password 'admin'?

this is a security issue...
userid=2? are you sure? usually admin = 1...

You are right. I followed wrong the guide to get the user id.
Thanks for helping a newbie

hello,

what about antivirus/antispam?
do you have to take care of those, before fetchmail hands the mails over to the mailgate?

thanks