Email integration (new user question)

The user guide says there is an “internal client” or you can use an external client. It does not really describe either.

  1. I am assuming that the INTERNAL email client is for SENDING email only.
    That seems easy to do: Ask DNS for an MX record for the hostname in the email address,
    then connect to port 25 or 587 and use SMTP to send the message.
    I would not expect to be able to receive email that way (but maybe it can read /var/spool/mail/user
    and soak in messages found there?)

  2. What functionality is enabled by selecting EXTERNAL client?
    I could imagine that the module could contain an IMAP client and use that to retrieve messages.
    Or there might be an “import mail from file” function somewhere. But if so, it is not obvious where
    to find a description of how to do this.

Can anyone help me?

Hi, I couldn’t find what you mention in the user guide.

What were you trying to achieve?

I would say that the internal client is the Emails module in SuiteCRM, where you can both receive and send emails (linking it any account, Gmail, corporate email, etc.).

An external client would be something like Outlook or Thunderbird.

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How would I use the internal email client to receive email?
Does SjuiteCRM become a mail server (listening on the SMTP port?
Or does it import folders from my regular email program?
Is there a good description of the feature set anywhere easy to find?

When you setup a user’s email in SuiteCRM, you provide SuiteCRM with the details (server address, user, password) of your email account which has to be stored elsewhere (Gmail, yahoo, your company email, etc.).

SuiteCRM is not an email server.

It’s a client exactly like any other web client, it shows you your email folders (that it grabs from an external server via POP3 or IMAP) and it let’s you send mail (that it sends via an external SMTP server).

The only thing special about using your email from SuiteCRM is:

  • that this sending capabilities are quite extended for mass mailing purposes (campaign management).
  • that you can link emails to Accounts, Contacts, Cases, etc., in SuiteCRM , to have a consistent view of all your interactions with a customer. you can see everything together that relates to a customer: calls, cases, emails, notes, etc.

Answering your last question, there’s no real complete documentation. But if you google for stuff regarding SugarCRM up to version 6.5, most of it applies to SuiteCRM. So, in this case, your best available email setup tutorials will be written on SugarCRM userguides.

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