Hello All, I hope everyone is having a good week. Spring has officially arrived here in New York :-)
This week, I wanted to discuss the differentiation between some of the options when configuring a mailbox for maileater in Service Desk 12.6. I had a few issues come across my desk this week where there was some confustion regarding two of these options: (1) "Attach Entire Email" and (2) "Force Attachment Splitout. Previously, in the earlier versions of Service Desk (6.0 and 11.2) when only a single mailbox was configured using options manger, these two options could not be installed at the same time - you had to choose between using one or the other. Now, in the more recent versions of the product, since we have added the functionality to configure multiple mailboxes, you can also now configure both of these to be enabled. With that, some folks advised of some confusion around what the difference is between the two options. Here I will explain...
"Attach Entire Email" - this option tells maileater to not only parse out the text of the email and open a ticket based on the email, but also to attach the entire email itself to the ticket as an attachment. These attachments are .EML files, which are usually opened using a mail client such as Microsoft Outlook. The EML file can be opened via a mail client, and will appear as any other email would had you opened it from your inbox using your email client. If the email had an attachement on it, that attachment would show up as being attached to the email itself - just as you receive emails with attachments normally and see the attachment on the email itself.
"Force Attachment Splitout" - this option tells maileater to separate out the files attached to the incoming emails and post those files as separate attachments on the ticket that gets created. If this option is NOT turned on (meaning the checkbox for it is not checked), then files attached to incoming emails will not be attached to the tickets created via maileater.
NOW, with that, say you have the Attach Entire Email option turned on, but not the Force Attachment Splitout - this would cause the entire incoming email itself to be attached to the ticket created via that email, but if there are files attached to that incoming email, they will not be available as separate attachemnts on the ticket but rather you would have to first download the .eml file, open it, and there you would see the attachments. If you had the Force Attachment Splitout option turned on but the Attach Entire Email NOT turned on, then maileater would parse the email out and create the ticket based on the text in the body and the mailbox rules that are configured for that mailbox, and would take the files attached to that email and make them attachments to the ticket, but the email itself would be discarded.
You CAN turn both of these on in which you would get both the .eml file and the separate attachments attached to the ticket created via maileter from that email.
Wphhhhew - thats a lot to digest ;-)
Now there are also some other options as well for configuring a mailbox - here is a quick description of some of those as well:
Attachment Repository - this is the repository that will be used to store both entire emails (if the Attach Entire Email option is turned on), and files that are attached to incoming emails (if the Force Attachment Splitout option is turned on). You can use the default service desk repository or you can create, and use, a separate repository specifically for maileater attachments and emails.
Allow Anonymous - this option specifies whether or not maileater will create a ticket when an email comes in from an unknown contact. In other words, if an incoming email has a "from" address that is a known email address in the Service Desk contact table then it will create a ticket normally. If this option is turned on, then it will create a ticket whether that email has a "from" address that is known or not.
Save Unknown Emails - this option tells maileater to save emails that came from unknown contacts. This can be use when the Allow Anonymous option is turned off. If the Allow Anonymous option is turned on, then ticekts will be created, thus they wont go into the mail-unkonwn folder.
I hope this helps answer some questions and clarifies some of these options for everyone.
Have a great week all :-)
Jon Israel
Sr. Support Engineer
CA Technologies