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2017 Key to Content: Upload Files to Alfresco via Email -- Inbound Emails

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Upload Files to Alfresco via Email -- Inbound Emails
ABOUT ME
"Data Ingestion" -- that's the process of getting files and data into your content management
Dick Weisinger
system, and Alfresco makes it easy. My favorite example is being able to drag-and-drop to a
Sausalito, San Francisco
mounted Alfresco CIFS drive. Alfresco 3.2R also introduces drag-and-drop within IMAP-
Bay Area, United States
compatible email clients like Outlook, which is pretty slick.
Dick is Vice President and
But there's another option that you may not know about that has been part of standard Alfresco for Chief Technologist at
Formtek.
a while and it's something that you may find to be very handy. That's the uploading of emails sent
to an Alfresco email address. This feature lets users send emails with attachments to Alfresco for View my complete profile
archival. Only emails coming from designated users whose originating email address matches the
email address that Alfresco knows from the user profile are accepted. This is a great option for Formtek.com
people out in the field to be able to simply email in data and files that they need to be stored in the
Alfresco repository.

You still need to use the Alfresco explorer JSF client to set it up, but once you've got it setup, you
can file data into the Records Management module, an Alfresco Share site document library, or
anywhere in the repository.

Step 1 -- Setup and Start the Alfresco Email Server

Edit the file Alfresco/tomcat/shared/classes/alfresco-global.properties. Change the section in the
file called "Alfresco Email Server" as show below. Basically, I've uncommented the email.server.*
and email.inbound.* properties. For the variable email.server.domain, I entered the name of the
server where Alfresco is running. In my case, I am testing on an Amazon EC2 instance, so I've
entered the Amazon Public DNS for my instance.
Interested in ECM Services and
In this case, I've set the email.server.port value to 25. You might want to verify that there is no Consulting?
email server already running on the Alfresco server machine and listening to port 25. Contact Formtek for expert assistance
with Nuxeo and Alfresco Open Source
On Linux to check this, I run the following command: content repositories, and Ephesoft data
netstat -nap --inet | grep 25 capture.

On Windows, you could just run netstat. MY BLOG LIST

Formtek Blog
14 hours ago
After making those changes, I stop and restart the Alfresco server.
Ephesoft Blog
1 week ago
1 # Alfresco Email Service and Email Server
Nuxeo Blog
2 #-------------
1 year ago
3
4 # Enable/Disable the inbound email service. The service could be used
Alfresco Blogs
5 # the Email Server (e.g. direct RMI access) so this flag is independent
6 #-------------
7 email.inbound.enabled=true
8 BLOG ARCHIVE
9 # Email Server properties ► 2015 (2)
10 #-------------
11 email.server.enabled=true ► 2014 (4)
12 email.server.port=25
13 email.server.domain=ec2-184-73-58-194.compute-1.amazonaws.com ► 2012 (3)
14 email.inbound.unknownUser=anonymous ► 2011 (7)
15
16 # A comma separated list of email REGEX patterns of allowed senders. ▼ 2010 (31)
17 # If there are any values in the list then all sender email addresses ► October (1)
18 # must match. For example:
19 # .*\@alfresco\.com, .*\@alfresco\.org ► July (2)
20 # Allow anyone:
21 #------------- ► June (1)
22 email.server.allowed.senders=.* ▼ May (3)
Mounting Alfresco as an IMAP
Mount Point in Outloo...

Step 2 -- Set Alfresco User Emails Upload Files to Alfresco via Email
Enable Alfresco users to be able to submit email uploads by starting up the Alfresco explorer client -- Inbound Emai...
and going into the Admin area. For each user that will be enabled for email submit verify that the Alfresco Records Management
email address entered in their Alfresco profiles match the address that they will be using when Free Trial

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20.10.2017 Key to Content: Upload Files to Alfresco via Email -- Inbound Emails
submitting emails. ► April (3)
► March (5)
Step 3 -- Add Users to the EMAIL_CONTRIBUTORS group
► February (9)
While still in the Alfresco administration area on the Alfresco explorer client, go into group
administration. Make sure that all users that are to be enabled to submit email uploads to Alfresco ► January (7)
are part of the Alfresco group EMAIL_CONTRIBUTORS.

Step 3 -- Setup email aliases for Alfresco folders (spaces) SUBSCRIBE TO KEY TO CONTENT
Identify which folders in Alfresco that you'd like users to be able to submit to. To do that, navigate Posts
to each of the target folders in the repository.
Comments
For example, here is a new folder in my user home area that is called "Email Inbox"

On examination of the properties for this folder, you can see an entry called "Email ID". This is
really all you need for being able to send emails. I can do an email upload submit by sending my
email to this email address, like: 545@ec2-184-73-58-194.compute-1.amazonaws.com.

More Details

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But it is somewhat nicer to be able to send to an email address that is easier to remember than
just a number.

To create an alias for the Email ID numeric, you need to first add an aspect to the folder.
Run Action -> Add Aspect to Item. Select the "Email alias" aspect.

Once the aspect is added, you'll see something like this.

The property "Email Alias" is now available. By selecting edit for the properties, you can define an
alias for the submit email name. For example, I can use 'inbox'. Note that the name you select is
case sensitive. After doing that, I can submit emails to populate the folder associated with the alias
name, like: inbox@ec2-184-73-58-194.compute-1.amazonaws.com.

Step 4 -- Start sending Emails

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20.10.2017 Key to Content: Upload Files to Alfresco via Email -- Inbound Emails
Send an email to the Alfresco email
server: inbox@ec2-184-73-58-194.compute-1.amazonaws.com, using the name appropriate for your system.
In this case I sent an email and an attachment called 'AlfrescoRMintro.txt'.

Then check the folder. Both the email body (with name based on the email subject) and
attachment have been uploaded to the folder.

Yes, that's really great. If you look at the property page for this email, you'll see something like
this:

There's only one thing that makes it not totally perfect. On the property page for the email body,
you can see the Attachments property with a link to the attachment document. That's great, but it
isn't a live link. You need to manually go back to the folder level and find the attachment
document. It would nice to just be able to click right there to see the attachment.
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AFLAȚI MAI MULTE AM ÎNȚELES

Posted by Dick Weisinger at 8:45 PM

2 comments:

NancyG June 17, 2010 at 2:18 PM

Dick,

Thanks for another great tutorial! Very thorough and much appreciated.

Nancy Garrity
Alfresco Community Manager
Reply

sajit August 9, 2010 at 7:49 PM

Hi, thanks for the tutorial. Can we take this a step further? I have a BPM software that will generate
a tender and email to 3 suppliers. I would like for the suppliers to reply to the email with their quotes
and be able to store their replies in a common folder automatically.

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20.10.2017 Key to Content: Upload Files to Alfresco via Email -- Inbound Emails
Thanks so much.
Sajit
Reply

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