About the Advanced Email Manager (Mail Manager)

3 minute read time.


The Email Management functionality is installed automatically with any CRM installation.

The CRM Email Management service runs as a background process on the server (EWAREEMAILMANAGER.EXE) and processes inbound emails according to predefined business rules.

Email Management requires the completion of some setup tasks by the System Administrator to enable it for use.

The Email Manager functionality can also be made available whether you use CRM's embedded Email Editor or another email client to handle outbound mail. It is also available for forwarding information from inbound mails (sitting in your email account) into your CRM system. This is described in the documentation.

A typical arrangement for the Mail Manager works like this: A customer sends an email to an account that is monitored by the Mail Manager. The mail manager service picks up the message and processes it according to the rules held in a JavaScript file. This file is known as the "template". The template is associated with the email account by settings defined in CRM

Administration -> E-mail and Documents -> E-mail Management Server Options

This area also allows the system administrator to fine-tune the way the message is processed.

The code that is held in the template (e.g. support.js) can perform just about any data task within CRM. You can create and add any number of templates to the system. You have full access to any of the data handling objects within CRM and many of the process objects. You could for example have the inbound email be filed in CRM as a communication record linked to a new case, and send an automatic email back to the customer giving them the proof that their support issue has been received. That outbound email may have attachments (e.g. faq.pdf). You could even ensure that when a customer sends another email quoting a reference number then that email is correctly filed against the existing data. The API allows interaction with workflow and table-level scripts.

The list of API objects that can be used in the Mail Manager templates is shown here:


How to create a mail manager template is covered in another article. The documentation describes how you can set the Mail Manager up can test it with the existing default templates.

There is only one Mail Manager service installed on the CRM server. (c.f. Self Service)

The installation directory is

C:\program files\sage\CRM\services\eWareEmailManager.exe

The registry details can be found

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\EmailManager

BUT really the Mail Manager picks up the information about which accounts to monitor and how to monitor them from the registry settings of the CRM installs themselves.

NOTE:

Because you can have multiple installs of CRM on a server but only one install of the mail manager, the mail manager can easily get confused as to which instance of CRM it is supposed to be serving. To ensure that your mail manager is interacting with the correct CRM instance then you will need to go to the CRM registry entries and blank (set to null) the EMlogin and EMpassword entries EXCEPT for the installation of CRM you wish to use with the mail manager.

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\eWare\Config\/CRM


I have also found that the mail manager is can run into problems with certain Anti Virus programs. You may need to register the eWareEmailManager.exe with your Anti Virus software as being allowed to carry out email tasks. Or you may need to change the ports that it works with if port 25 (SMTP) is blocked by the AV software. For example in your email server and CRM change the ports to 111 (for POP3) and 26 (SMTP).

Sometimes everything will work on a Development machine but on the live server, the mail manager fails. One test to make is to stop the mail manager service and queue a monitored email account with an email message. Then reboot the server. If there is a brief window where the Mail Manager can connect and process immediately on startup but then subsequently stops then it is likely to be another program clashing with the Mail Manager.