Considering there have been a lot of questions regarding both email accounts and Cron settings, we have decided to post some help here and some FAQs at the end of it. If you think something may be improved/added, please feel free to post below and we will decide whether to add it or not to this mini tutorial
Email accounts:
In order to set up email accounts, some information such as ports, servers and security are needed, so if you are not sure about this, please ask your email server administrator for these details.
Administration Electronic Mail Account:This is the email account that your Feng Office installation is going to use to send notifications and reminders, so it is important to have it right.
We usually select "SMTP server" as mail transport, and remember that "SMTP address"
usually is the same as "SMTP username".
Here you have an example for a Gmail account:
MS Exchange compatibility mode: No
Mail transport: SMTP server
SMTP server: smtp.gmail.com
Port: 465
SMTP address: emailname@gmail.com
Use SMTP authentication: Yes
SMTP username: emailname@gmail.com
SMTP password: mypassword
Use secure SMTP connection: Yes, use SSL
Email fetch limit: 10
Enable IMAP synchronization when sending emails from Feng Office: No
Regular Electronic Mail Account:If we want to set up a regular email account, we must go to Email>Accounts>Add email account.
Once we are there, we have to type in the data required (careful with the port numbers, authentication, server, security, etc.)
Take into account that when you introduce a Gmail, Yahoo or Hotmail account, Feng Office will automatically recognize it and fill in certain info for you. Do remember that when you set a Hotmail account, you may recieve emails, but not send them, and this happens because of THEIR settings, not ours.
If we set an IMAP email account, we will be able to choose which folders would we like to recieve emails from, by clicking on the select boxes.
If you happen to see a section mentioning IMAP synchronization, it is because your Feng Office Administrator has enabled this, otherwise, you will not see it. What is this for? Simple, this way you will be able to synchronize the emails you send from Feng Office with your email server, as long as it is an IMAP account.
Cron Events:
With the Cron Events, which the Feng Office Administrator will be able to set, your Feng Office installation may look for new emails automatically, send notifications, reminders and check for upgrades. How does this help? You will not spend time wasting for emails to be generated and sent for instance when you create a new object and subscriptions must be sent.
FAQs:Q: I am 100% sure my email accounts settings are fine, but I still cannot send/recieve emails. What could it be?
A: You ought to double-check if the server hosting your Feng Office installation has those ports open or not.
Q: Downloading only 10 emails? How am I supposed to synchronize my email account with over 4k recieved emails?!
A: "Email fetch limit" This is the maximum amount of emails that you are going to download each time you press "Check mails". Do take into consideration that if you have the Cron Events running, you may download EVERY email from the account.
Q: IMAP Synchronization....? What is that?
A: From Feng Office 1.7.1 onwards you may synchronize the emails you send from Feng Office with your email Server via IMAP. Your Feng Office Administrator must set this to "Yes" and then you should edit your email account and fill in the required fields for this to work.
Q: The IMAP synchronization sounds great! But what if I have already been using Feng Office for a while and have not been able to synchronize this? Is it too late to synchronize my old sent emails from Feng Office?
A: No, it is not too late. Your Feng Office Administrator may do this for you by looking for the "Sync" button at Administration>Email Accounts, or you may do it yourself by running the following script:
.../public/tools/mailsyncscript.php?email=["email"]&username=["username"]
where:
["email"] = email address to be synchronized (i.e.: something@something.com)
["username"] = username of the owner of the account (i.e.: user1)
Q: The Cron seems to be a great tool... but how do I run it??
A: To run the FENG_ROOT/cron.php file:
in Linux, set a cron to run it
in Windows OS, you need to set a scheduled task to run it (you can create them at the Control Panel)
in order to do that in Windows, you have to run it with the php application, i.e.:
c:\path\php\php.exe c:\path\a\feng\cron.php
