Email management

[David Jondreau]

I have a client who wants to be able to pull e-mails into Filemaker.

I have a table of Correspondence which is related to Job Orders. Correspondence records have been hand-typed notes about phone conversations, in person meetings, and e-mails, but now the client wants to actually save the e-mail itself in the record.

The office is cross-platform with a mix of Apple Mail, and Entourage (both Win and Mac), Outlook Express. They're talking about moving to G-Mail for server though. Don't know if that's a factor.

I suppose a container field holding either the e-mail itself or a pdf is the best way to do this, but I wanted to check with you folks first to see what experience others have had in similar situations.

Thanks for any tips.

David

[mr_vodka]

We are a Windows shop and tend to save our emails as the Outlook .msg format. Entourage I believe uses .eml format. Perhaps your best bet may be to save as html and then import those files.

[bcooney]

Why couldn't the correspondence record serve as the email? Send it out from FM using SMTPit. Receive emails in using POPit.

Edited April 21, 2009 by Guest

[David Jondreau]

I don't have any experience with the CNS plug-ins, but I'll certainly check them out. Have you used them?

[bcooney]

Yes, that and 360works. We've built a system that creates "activities" and for type "email" the user sees an email client interface. We had to go the plugin route for html and multiple attachments.

To receive, each incoming email is an activity, and we populate keys with a match on email address.

[mr_vodka]

Having used both CNS and 360 Works, I prefer 360 works because it supports IMAP but if that doesnt matter to you and you can use POP3 then the CNS plugins are cool too.