Overview of Email Handling Features

One of the main benefits of PerlDesk is it’s ability to handle your companies email, incoming and outgoing. You can set PerlDesk up to handle an individual or multiple email accounts, for example support@perldesk.com and billing@perldesk.com could be piped into PerlDesk without interference with your companies individual and personal accounts.

Having your public email addresses handled by PerlDesk will allow your support/billing or relevant teams access to all the outstanding emails within their departments - meaning an email is no longer passed or forwarded from mail client to mail client or person to person, everything is centralized in PerlDesk and everyone (with sufficient access permissions) can view and manage those emails.

When an email is received, an ID is generated by PerlDesk for that email (now a ticket in PerlDesk), that ID number is sent to the customer for reference with a confirmation of receipt and an email can be sent to your staff with notification of a new release. You can alternatively switch off the auto-responders to clients so that it is a silent system on the front-end, your customers wouldn’t know you were using anything other than a usual mail client - causing no disruption or confusion to them.

Technical Aspects and Enabling Email Retrieval

There are two ways PerlDesk can connect to your mail server and retrieve email. The first, the POP3 Retrieval option is the most common method for fetching emails, and is used by normal email clients such as Outlook, Entourage and Thunderbird - so plugging PerlDesk in should be no different to configuring a mail client to fetch emails. The second option, is Email Piping, this is a system level option that instructs your MTA (Mail Transfer Agent) such as Sendmail or Exim on Linux to pipe an email to a specific file on the system rather than a users mail account

1. Setting up POP Retrieval

Please obtain the POP3 account settings from your administrator before continuing, you will need the POP hostname, port, username and password.

In the PerlDesk Administration go to:

Settings > Incoming Email > Email Piping

Enter the email address you would like PerlDesk to manage and map that email address to a department, meaning any emails received will be routed initially to the department you specify. This allows you to setup several email addresses such as support@domain and billing@domain and map them to relevant departments.

Now you must configure your POP3 account details by going to:

Admin > Incoming Email > POP Retrieval

Simply create a new POP server by entering the required credentials. If you are unsure about the PORT enter 110, this is the standard port used for POP3 connections.

You have now setup PerlDesk to connect to a POP server, you will obviously want this to run automatically every x minutes to ensure PerlDesk fetches emails, to do this on Windows create a scheduled task and execute the /include/pop-email.cgi file. at the desired interval - you will need to enter the Scheduled command like this:

C:\Perl\bin\wperl.exe "C:\wamp\Apache2\cgi-bin\include\pop-email.cgi"

On Linux, you can simply create a CRON entry to execute the file every x minutes:

crontab -e
*/5 * * * * /home/user/www/perldesk/include/pop-email.cgi

To use email PIPING you will need to modify the system level mail files for the domain in relation to your PerlDesk install, for example, perldesk.com on an EXIM mail server you would

pico /etc/valiases/perldesk.com
support@perldesk.com: |/home/user/www/perldesk/include/email.cgi

This does not require a cron entry or scheduled task as the mail server passes it to PerlDesk instantly on receipt of the email.

That’s it! You should be up and running, if you have any questions or problems please send us an email or visit our own PerlDesk Support Portal at www.licensearea.com/desk