Email Integration: Sending Emails to Codebeamer
Email integration allows you to send emails to Codebeamer.
For more information about emails you can receive from Codebeamer, see Notifications
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The messages sent using MAPI/RPC are not supported.
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Replying to Codebeamer Notification Mails
Example:
1. John adds a comment to an issue in Codebeamer.
2. Codebeamer sends a notification to all subscribers of the issue. Mary is one of the subscribers.
3. Mary receives a notification e-mail from Codebeamer and replies to it.
4. Codebeamer receives the reply from Mary, adds it as a comment on the issue, and sends notification to all interested, including John.
5. The collaboration can continue.
Depending on your subscriptions Codebeamer can send you a notification about changes in tracker issues, wiki pages, forum posts, or documents. For more information, see Notifications.
Once the Main Inbox has been configured, every subscriber receives notification emails from the Codebeamer’s Main Inbox. The format of the email is as follows:
• The From field of the notifying email displays the name of the user who made the modifications.
• The To field contains the email address of the Main Inbox.
Codebeamer sends notifications on behalf of the author of changes. It allows you to organize your inbox, for example, with an Inbox Assistant.
If you receive an email about a Wiki page change or a tracker item change you can simply reply to the incoming email, add your comments and send back to the provided reply-to mail address. These replies are periodically read from email-accounts and if appropriate, are added to the Wiki or Tracker Items.
Consider the following example:
1. John adds a comment to an issue in Codebeamer.
2. Codebeamer sends a notification to all subscribers of the issue, including Mary who is one of the subscribers.
3. Mary receives a notification e-mail from Codebeamer and replies to it.
4. Codebeamer receives Mary's reply, adds it as a comment to the issue and sends notification to all subscribers of the issue, including John.
5. The collaboration continues.
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Your reply goes to the Main Inbox of Codebeamer, and not directly to the person shown in From field.
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In special cases, when security guidelines of your mail provider do not allow sending emails on behalf of members from different domains, you can configure Codebeamer in such a way that all emails are sent from the same address. The actual author's name is still shown as the name of the sender in the email, but the From field of the email is set to the one defined in the Codebeamer configuration.
Sending Mail to Trackers or Forums
If set up as described in the Configuration section, you can send emails to a Codebeamer tracker or forum, and Codebeamer creates a new tracker item or forum post based on the email's sender, subject, content and attachments. You can find the email address for a tracker or forum, if any in the title bar of a tracker or forum.
Configuration
• Create an email account for Codebeamer.
• Configure the Codebeamer Main Inbox to read reply to emails.
• Create additional email accounts and associated inboxes for any trackers and forums you want to send mails to.
• Associate the additional inboxes with their target trackers and forums.
• Configure the mail client.
Creating Email Accounts (POP3 or IMAP)
Consult your email provider, about access data. For example Gmail. The accounts must be for Codebeamer use only. These account must not be used by any user, as Codebeamer reads and delete emails from these accounts.
Configuring Email Clients
You can configure your email client to set a format for the email replies and to define whether the original message is included in the reply.
For Microsoft Outlook versions 2002,2003,2007, PTC recommends you use plain-text formatting for the content of the message and configure Microsoft Outlook to start quoted lines with a >.
If using HTML formatting, lot of generated HTML code appears in the replies. This may make the reply content difficult to read, and it may look different from other parts of the page, for example, the comments for tracker issues.
To configure quoted lines:
1. Click > .
2. Select the Preferences tab and click Email options.
3. Select Prefix each line of the original message.
4. In the box corresponding to Prefix each line with, enter > without any quotes.
• For ThunderBird 2.0: No change is required in the default settings since the default reply format is handled by the email integration in both HTML and plain-text formats.
Alternatively, you can perform the following actions:
• Exclude the original message in the reply.
• Remove unwanted content ,such as the original message, in the reply.
Formatting Replies
You can send replies to Codebeamer in two formats: plain text or HTML. E-mail clients can send the same content in both formats, within one email. If the E-mail is received in both format the plain text is preferred and the HTML format is ignored (configurable).
For information on changing the format of the received email notifications, see Customizing Notification Emails
Plain-Text Replies
Plain text replies can contain wiki formatting which is added as wiki comments to tracker issues. When parsing plain-text replies the lines starting with > are automatically removed as they are considered quoted lines from the original message.
HTML Replies
HTML formatted replies are added as HTML format and if such replies contain wiki formatting, they are ignored. During the processing of an HTML email, the Codebeamer inbox manager code tries to identify the quoted message of the original. If successful all quoted parts of the original message are removed. If this parsing fails, the incoming message is inserted as received.
Also, when sending HTML formatted emails, it is recommended that you only add your content before or after the original message. Mixing lines of the original message and comments may result in the new modifications being lost.
PTC recommends ThunderBird as the mail service. Microsoft Outlook is not recommended, because different Outlook versions produce varied HTML content due to the Microsoft Word-based HTML editors.
Attachments
Attachments are handled as binary data and their file names are preserved, and they are added as attachments to the tracker issue or forum posts. Emails may contain any number of attachments. However, note that the POP3 or IMAP email account may not handle large amounts of data. Typically, few megabyte of attachments are supported.