BugNET

emilner wrote First, thanks for a great software. I've read and re-read all of the information available reguarding email generated bugs but am still missing the fundamental understanding of everything that it does.  By-the-way, I do have it working after a spending the better part of a day testing using the trial and error method. I'd like to ask some questions that are still bugging me, and the answers may help others too.  Some of the topics were touched upon in other forum posts, but not totally clear. There is POP3 Mailbox Settings in Administration > Application Configuration which you configure Enable, Server, Username, Password, Polling Interval, Delete Processed Messages, Process Attachments, Body Template, and Reporting Username.  This appears to be application-wide configuration.  Then there is Mailboxes in Administration > Projects > Edit Project in which you configure a Mailbox, who the new bug is to be assigned to, and the issue type.  What's confusing me, and appearently others is exactly what each of the mailboxes do and what to put in each of them. Question 1: Could you describe the intent for how this is used.  In other words, would each project have one POP3 email address that the application retrieves mail from and creates bugs, tasks, feature requests, Improvement requests from?  Or would each of those 'Types' use a separate POP3 email address.  If only one POP3 email address is needed for all of the 'Types', then how does the application determine the type from each email it retrieves? Question 2: If each project can have specific mailboxes that bugs are sent to, why have an application-wide mailbox? Question 3: Why doesn't the project mailbox configuration contain a password? Question 4: Is there a requirement that the email contain a "TO NAME:" in addition to the "TO ADDRESS" and is this value used to route the email? If yes, then could you provide example for the Mailbox field. Question 5: Is there any required text or format for the body of the email? Question 6: It looks like the emai's subject text becomes the bugs 'Summary' text.  Is there any required text that should be in the subject? I know this is long but this is such a great feature not be fully understood and used. Thanks Ed

Hi Ed,

I will try to answer your questions as best I can

1. Currently the mailbox reader will only read from one server configured in the application settings but mailbox = to address. So each incoming email is checked against the to address to determine which mailbox settiings to use.
2. The term mailbox is probably not the best wording here. Think of a mailbox as the to address.
3. Project mailbox is only the addressee.
4. There is no filtering on the message or looking for a specific string or test in the subject or body.  It will process each message blindly.  Lots of room for improvement here.
5. No, none at the moment.
6. No, none at the moment.

The code for this functionality was submitted by a project contributor some time ago.  I haven't spend much time on this functionality myself but I will be making a point to do a bit of redesign to improve this fucntionality.  Filtering on subject and / or text in the body will be some of the added features but if you have any others I would be most interesting in hearing your requirements.

Davin Dubeau
BugNET - Core Developer