openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Ronald Portier <ronald@xxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

I basically agree with everything Eric Caudal wrote.

I might add a few shortcomings as well. With Therp we developed one
approach and module as a partial work-around. But so far only for 6.1.

- One thing we encountered, already with 6.1, is that mails are
retrieved from imap based on whether they have been seen (=read) or not.
Result is that when users use any other mechanism to look at their mail,
for instance Thunderbird or other mail client, the mails will never be
retrieved by OpenERP.

- Another one: also for special e-mail accounts (for instance to receive
incoming invoices, of issues from customers) a lot of irrelevant
messages will be received. From spam to out-of-office replies. Just
blindly creating objects for those (account.invoice, project.issue) will
pollute OpenERP very quickly.

- A third one - we still have no workaround for this - is that sometimes
e-mails are linked to leads. Or to prospects. Then they become
customers. But the email traffic with leads and/or prospects it not seen
under customer, therefore is incomplete.

In 7.0 I noticed a weird distinction between mail.mail and mail.message.
Incoming mail will be put in mail.message, which has a very limited
form, making it impossible to really look at the contents and attributes
of the mail.

After working for some time with e-mail in OpenERP, we decided that by
itself it was never going to work. People need all the functionality of
their full e-mail clients. Still it is useful, or often necessary, to
have a full view of e-mail correspondence with clients. Also integration
between OpenERP for example for sending out invoices, or receiving
issues, is very useful.

The method we came up with was to let users use their normal mail client
- whatever client they prefer - to send or receive e-mails. But then
synchronize imap folders with OpenERP. So if an email is for or from a
customer, it can be put in a folder customers. If an incoming mail is an
invoice (for something we purchased), it can go into a folder invoices.

So the user decides really what the nature of an e-mail is, and where it
should be put in OpenERP.

In this way we have the best of both worlds, the full functionality of
modern email clients, with full integration with OpenERP.

The fetchmail_attach_from_folder module is part of server-env-tools/6.1.
It has not been upgraded to 7.0 yet. I invite people that are interested
to have a look at this module, developed by my colleague Holger Brunn.

Functionally the main thing still missing is adding mails send from
OpenERP to imap, to have a complete synchronization.

Kind regards, Ronald

P.s. also in server-env-tools a very small module made by me to give
normal users access to the email views: mail_client_view.

W. Martin Borgert schreef op 11-10-13 19:34:
> Quoting "Eric Caudal" <eric.caudal@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
>> Here are the functionalities that we missed out of the box:
> [your valid points removed here]
> 
>  - no useful handling of attachments when receiving mail, one cannot
>    click on an image attachment and it just opens etc. (I assume,
>    there is no MIME handling at all)
> 
> - document attaching when sending mail is missing any re-use of
>   documents, e.g. one can only attach external files, that than are
>   added to the document store, but no re-use documents
> 
> - no way of deciding to send a text-only (non-HTML) email
> 
> - no spam filter support for receive emails
> 
> - no global auto attachment for all outgoing email (e.g. company
>   vcard)
> 
> - no original text when (typically indented with '>') replying,
>   at least not in project issue
> 
> - no globally configurable cc/bcc addresses for certain domains
>   (e.g. add support person to all outgoing emails from helpdesk)
> 
>> - Are there out there other partners/customers willing to invest in
>> improving the ergonomic of OpenERP for the emailing system (again
>> getting it a simple but reasonable webmail interface)?
> 
> I hacked for my own purpose in the email module, adding support
> for spam filter, auto attachment of vcard, global cc/bcc. But
> this is not really helpful for anybody else, I fear. No problem
> in sending you my changes anyway, but you don't want them :~)
> 
> Making a good web mail interface is hard. Some people say, Google
> did it not so bad, but I never really tried it. Wouldn't it be
> better to integrate better with existing email infrastructure,
> whatever people are used to use? So that people can just use their
> Thunderbird or MS-Outlook or whatever?
> 
> Cheers
> 
> 
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-- 
Met vriendelijke groet / Kind regards,

Ronald Portier
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