Redmine

Use the IMAP method, i.e. a cron periodically fetches mails from IMAP, which IIRC exchange can serve.

Hello Felix, and thank you for the input.
I don't think cron jobs run on Windows.
What would you recommend on terms of scripting a job for Redmine running on Windows Server 2003?
And what exactly would I need to configure?
Thanks

I don't know windows, so I can't tell you much, but "all" you need to do is call the /path/to/rake with the correct options for the IMAP stuff (there should be a tutorial for that too) at say 5 minutes interval. Windows can do that, you just need to throw the rake call in a batch file, and create a windows service (or whatever it was called) to run that batch file every 5 minutes.

Felix, thanks again.
I see the light at the end of the tunnel. This gives me the general idea of what needs to be done.
I don't know Redmine yet, this is my first time using it, finding a five minute tutorial on doing this would be great.
I've searched the usual suspects (i.e. google, Experts-Exchange, this forum, etc...), but so far I have not found more concrete, detail directions.
Again, if you or anyone else can point me in the right directions....
Thanks again.
-Julio

We use the following script to fetch email from Exchange 2003 via the IMAP protocol.
A Scheduled task is setup to run the script every five minutes. We are running Redmine 0.8.4.

Fetch_imap.bat

@echo off

echo Fetch general Redmine mails
call rake redmine:email:receive_imap RAILS_ENV="production" host=yourexchangeserver username=username@yourdomain.com password=yourpassword project=nameofyourprojectwhereissueshouldbecreated tracker=bug allow_override=project

Hello Simon,
I ran the bat file modified for our environment.

@@echo off

echo Fetch general Redmine mails
rake redmine:email:receive_imap RAILS_ENV="production" host=mail.ourdomain.com username=username@ourdomain.com password=XXX unknown_user=create project=help tracker=support allow_override=priority --trace@

I get the following back:

Fetch general Redmine mails
(in C:/Program Files/BitNami Redmine Stack/apps/redmine)

• Invoke redmine:email:receive_imap (first_time)
• Invoke environment (first_time)
• Execute environment
• Execute redmine:email:receive_imap

But nothing is created in my project. The name of my project is "GQRR Helpdesk" and its identifier is "help"

Any and all help is appreciated.

Thanks,
-Julio

It might be that the email is already read. Connect to the account with an Outlook client and mark all the messages unread.

/Simon

Thanks, that was the issue.
Now I have a separate issue.
I've changed the general option "unknown_user" from "create" to "accept".
Before, when set to "create" it indeed created a new user using its email address as its logon ID. We do not want this.
I still want to capture the issue, but I don want to create a new user for unknown users. Thus the change.
However, now the users are not being created and the issues are not being reported.
Any thoughts?
here is the bat file being used:

@echo off

echo Fetch general Redmine mails
rake redmine:email:receive_imap RAILS_ENV="production" host=mail.ourdomain.com username=username@ourdomain.local password=ourpassword unknown_user=accept project="help" tracker=support allow_override=project,priority

Thanks in advance

Sorry, we haven't needed this kind of scenario. Also we use redmine 0.8.4 and this was not implemented at that time I believe.

Remember that the issues might have been read this time too.

/Simon

I don't think there's a built-in way to retain sender information without creating an account for her/him.

Redmine allows the creation of entries by an "Anonymous" author.
This function is now working.
I'm not sure why it was not working before, but it is working now.
Thanks