Email Piping from Google Apps Email Account??

[CPMiller]

Has anyone ever used Google Apps mail to feed into WHMCS? Specifically, client sends support ticket to, say, support@xyz.com, which is really an email account hosted by Google under GApps. That email then feeds into WHMCS to auto-create a ticket.

 

I'm trying to get this to work to no avail. Either I'm missing something fundamental or it's just not possible. I've set, under Setup || Support Ticket Departments, the email stuff. For discussion's sake:

 

Support department email: support@xyz.com

Hostname: pop.gmail.com

Login Name: support@xyz.com

Password: xxxxxxx

 

I left the CRON job as-is (i.e., what ships out of the box) for ticket importing via POP3.

 

Any suggestions? Or if it ain't gonna work ever, could someone tell me this so I don't commit suicide out of frustration trying to make the unworkable work?

 

Thanks!

 

Charles

[BryanB]

That should work. Are you having trouble receiving email or sending it out? I also found a better way of receiving email if you do not want to wait for a cron to run every 5 minutes before you receive an email. By forwarding email from my google apps domain to a subdomain on the same cpanel server as whmcs you can use pipe to instantly get new email vs waiting every 5 minutes for a cron check.

 

There's also an email import error log that may help you troubleshoot.

[CPMiller]

Bryan

 

Actually, based on something else I found here in the forums (don't know why it didn't turn up in my first search) I got things working, I was missing a couple of key pieces like turning POP on in GMail and putting into WHMCS the proper port number but, once those got remedied, I was good to go.

 

As for the CRON stuff, my CRON job is set for every 60 seconds, so even l'il ole impatient me isn't kept waiting too too long. But your idea of mail forwarding to a domain on the WHMCS server got me wondering what sort of return addressing comes through. The ticketing system is looking for a client-registered email address but from my testing here, the address that comes through isn't the customer's, it's the cPanel-server-based email address. What am I missing...how does WHMCS determine that it's client X who sent in the ticket and then respond to client X when there's a reply on the ticket?

 

Charles

[BryanB]

Glad you got it figured out. I forgot about turning on POP in gmail. I considered doing the 1 minute cron but after some research it turns it isn't considered best practice. Reason being, if your cron runs and takes longer than 60 seconds to run (maybe if there is a lot of email or a large file attachment) than the cron will run again before it can finish causing some problems. I've never seen this happen and not sure how likely it is to happen or if its just an edge case but I'm pretty happy with the forwarding method.

 

When gmail forwards mail to another address the headers are preserved and the same From and To address remain the same as the original.

 

So I have it setup like so:

 

My public support email adress is: support@example.com - Customers email this address then google apps forwards all mail sent to this address to "support@example2.com" (an add-on domain setup in my cpanel) I then setup the WHMCS email pipe to pipe email from support@example2.com address into WHMCS. The mail headers are still preserved so WHMCS is able to identify the "from" address and identify the client and it can also identify the "to" address to determine which department the ticket should be opened in.

 

Been using it for a few months now and it has been working flawlessly. Google Apps is definitely worth it, we've really cut down on a lot of spam and are able to archive all of our emails in google for extra backup and those times when WHMCS strips HTML or embedded images that we need to see.

[Gears]

For every one else that finds this thread, here's the thread that probably shed some light:

http://forum.whmcs.com/showthread.php?17963-How-to-make-Google-Apps-for-Your-Domain-work-with-WHMCS-in-5-steps

[BryanB]

For every one else that finds this thread, here's the thread that probably shed some light:

http://forum.whmcs.com/showthread.php?17963-How-to-make-Google-Apps-for-Your-Domain-work-with-WHMCS-in-5-steps

 

The thing I didnt like about those steps when I was setting mine up is having to use the cron method. It took me a bit of research to figure out that I can forward mail back to an email address still on my server and preserve the headers in order to use the pipe method and get mail instantly. I even emailed WHMCS for some ideas but they just said it wasn't possible. Turns out it is and it's pretty simple and in my opinion it's 100x better then waiting for a cron or running it every minute.