How to fetch from Exchange Shared Mailbox ?

[thedawn]

Hi,

[Search is not working this morning so I have to post this - apologies if it's already been answered . ]

We're moving from using an Exchange shared mailbox to OTRS for our helpdesk. I want to fetch emails from this team mailbox to OTRS. My setup works fine fetching from the mailbox of a normal domain user account but the problem is the shared mailbox isn't actually a user and has no password!

Must this mailbox be connected to a user for OTRS to be able to read from it?

Many thanks for your help,
Dawn

[jojo]

you should not ue any shared mailbox as no human should directly have access to an OTRS mailbox to avoid inconsistence

[thedawn]

Thanks jojo for your response.

We had planned to run a pilot project using one OTRS queue for some specific emails to the shared mailbox (with OTRS reading from a subfolder which is populated manually) to convince management of the benefits.

From what you are saying this is not possible? I do understand the risk of inconsistencies but what if we accepted these risks for the pilot phase?
Do you have any suggestions on how we can accomplish the switchover?

Thanks again,
Dawn

[jojo]

OTRS will also always fetch all mails from this box. So for testing crreate a new mailbox and send a copy of all inbound mails to the new box also

[thedawn]

As I mentioned, for our setup OTRS will read only from a subfolder into which selected emails are placed manually. So the rest of the emails in the shared mailbox will not be fetched and the mailbox will remain intact.

My original question still stands - is it possible (I know it is not advised) to have OTRS read from a shared mailbox rather than a user mailbox?

[crythias]

@thedawn:
If you know/think you know/that OTRS is able to only fetch from that shared folder, then you know the answer to your question. Hint: You can't do it via POP3, though.
But *I* don't think it's possible or advisable to tempt fate on this. Just create a new account. How hard is that?

[thedawn]

Thank crythias but I don't know the answer to my question, which is why I asked it here. I don't know that OTRS can read from this shared folder - that was my original question. OTRS insists I give it a password for each postmaster mail account but for a shared exchange mailbox there is no password, so how do I get around that?

P.S. Creating a new mailbox is hard - it takes 10 days in our place and I'd like to demo this next week!

[crythias]

a shared exchange mailbox there is no password, so how do I get around that?

You can't.

P.S. Creating a new mailbox is hard - it takes 10 days in our place and I'd like to demo this next week!

Use a gmail account.

[thedawn]

You can't.

Finally this answers my question.

Use a gmail account.

Firewall requests also take 10 days in our place. Plus people who've been using our hepldesk email address for the past three years need to suddenly start using a new one? The transition must be transparent to customers so the whole point of the excercise is to use the same email address.

Thank you for your help.

[jojo]

for testing and showing you should not use the real mailaddress

[crythias]

What jojo said.

The 10 days isn't OTRS's problem, it's yours. Test it in the cloud on a virtual private server on your own time against a gmail account that receives forwarded emails based upon an Outlook Rule for this request.

[thedawn]

for testing and showing you should not use the real mailaddress

Thanks, I have tested extensively. I now have to prove that it can be integrated seamlessly and transparently with our current setup.

The 10 days isn't OTRS's problem, it's yours

What the ? I'm well aware it's my problem. Hence my mistake in posting here. What an arrogant attitude.

As mentioned already: setting up in the cloud against a gmail account or anywhere else will not show that we can use OTRS within our company's strict environment.

Goodbye, good luck and learn to be nice.

[crythias]

learn to be nice

:) Have the greatest of days. :)

[thedawn]

[crythias]

But, also, once you get the basics configured, please look at the additional HowTo's I and others have provided viewforum.php?f=60

My views are not those of OTRS. I'm just a guy, but I realize the audience for these forum topics may be bigger than the interaction between you and I. It's not just that I'm talking to you about your concerns, but if someone looks at this thread and needs alternatives for situations that resemble yours, I'm providing options for them, as well. A few months hence, someone might look at this topic and say, "Hey, I have the same problem.... how can I deal with this? ... hmm. Maybe I can do that."

[jojo]

Thanks, I have tested extensively. I now have to prove that it can be integrated seamlessly and transparently with our current setup.

be sure it can. If your company is not able to help you on this due to the strict rules nobody can expect that a demo will show 100%....

[quickndirty]

I had the exact same problem. Finding this thread, I thought: this question is already a few years old, but why not share your knowledge for future nerds to come?

So, here's what one of our admins found out: You can actually pull emails/tickets from an MS Exchange Shared Mailbox.This also works in standard mail clients like Thunderbird or even on Android! However, SMTP will not work, so sending emails or ticket responses might prove difficult. I shall revisit and update this thread again if something new regarding SMTP comes up.

The manually filled subfolder to pull the mails from is also possible, description below.

As for the config: You will need a user which is allowed to fetch mail from the shared mailbox (you will need that anyway, so it should not be a problem).

Now, in your OTRS Postmaster Email Config, you set the fields as follows:
Type: IMAPS
User: <authorizedusername>@<companydomain>/<sharedmailboxusername>@<companydomain>
(Our admin says, the combination <authorizedusername>@<companydomain> must also be a valid email adress. Dunno )
Password: <authorizeduserpassword>
Host: <yourIMAPdomainname>
IMAP folder: INBOX/<subfoldername>

Finally, edit the Queue settings to suit your needs and you should be able to use this. Also, check the OTRS sylog. The usual "New Ticket created from..." and "IMAPS: Fetched 1 email(s)..." should be visible.

Afaik I used OTRS 3.3.14 (turnkeylinux virtual appliance for testing) and MS Exchange Server 2010. Other systems may of course provoke different results.

[bayerex]

@quickndirty. Thank you so much for posting the solution. That was really helpful!

[quickndirty]

Hi there again,

I am glad that my solution is already helpful. (We are still using it successfully, with various different mailboxes and also various subfolders for different queues. Interestingly enough, despite any worries about inconsistency and so on, some former users of the Exchange Shared Mailbox still have access to that Shared Mailbox and use the subfolders to "forward" wrongly adressed mails from their personal mailboxes directly to the correct queue. Neat! )

As for the SMTP story, there ist no real update, but I wanted you to know how we do it, nonetheless. Simple as that: Exchange Servers can allow sending mails via SMTP with any sender adress (including the adress of a certain Shared Mailbox) and even without authentication. If I remember correctly, you can allow only certain hosts / IP adresses to do that, and there you go. It's not elegant and might not be the solution for very strict environments, but all I need to do now is define the mail adress I want to send from in the OTRS system adress section and just use it.

Greetings!