How does the Email Router work?
The Email Router monitors one (or more, but this is a non-default configuration) Exchange mailbox for messages and routes them into the CRM system. This monitored mailbox is often called crmmail@yourdomain.com.
As you want to route the emails from several Exchange mailboxes (your users, your queues) into the CRM, you need to setup a forwarding rule from the actual mailbox of your user into the crmmail mailbox, where the Email Router can process it. To do so, you use the Rule Deployment Wizard included with the Email Router.
The Rule deployed by the Rule Deployment Wizard forwards every email as an attachment (this is important, the email router can process the messages only this way!) to the crmmail mailbox. The Email Router monitors that mailbox and transfers messages from that mailbox into the CRM system. During the transfer, the Email Router checks if the email address in the TO / CC field of the email message matches any user / queue in the CRM. If not, the message will not be processed. That means, that a message having the user's email address only in BCC will not be processed by the Email Router, because the Email Router doesn't know where to deliver that email to.
How to setup the Email Router?
The process can be pretty easy - but debugging in case of errors can be very time consuming. So plan a few hours for the setup!
The general outline is:
- Create an Exchange-enabled user called CRMMail
- Put the machine account the Exchange-server is running on into the PrivUserGroup of your CRM installation
- Install the Software on the Exchange server
- During the setup, indicate that you want to monitor crmmail@yourdomain.com
- Start the Rule Deployment wizard and deploy the rules for your users and queues
- Log on to the CRM system using an user account. Go to Tools / Options and enable the option to track every email in CRM, not only answers to emails sent from the CRM.
- Using an outside address (use a webmailer or so - the handling of internal emails is different from outside emails), send an email to that user.
- Wait about a minute and check the users email queue in CRM.
- If there's no message, check the application log on the Exchange server. There should be an error indicating the problem.
- If that still doesn't help, reboot the Exchange server and try again.
- If that sill doesn't help, you have to debug the whole process. This will take a lot of time. Refer the the Microsoft CRM 3.0 Implementation Guide for details.
The Email Router is already working on my installation, I want to setup the CrmIncomingData queue
Once the prerequisites are set (test it! Debugging will be tough if you fail to test the whole setup), adding a new queue is pretty easy:
- Create a queue in CRM having the email address set to the address visible to the outside. For example: crmincomingdata@yourdomain.com
- Create an Exchange-enabled user in Active Directory having the logon name set to crmincomingdata.
- Wait some time to let Exchange create the associated email addresses for that user.
- Once the email address is present, test the setup. Send an email from the outside to the crmincomingdata@yourdomain.com address, logon to the account using Outlook Web Access and see if the email is there.
- Deploy the forwarding rule using the Rule Deployment Wizard.
- Send an email from the outside to the crmincomingdata@yourdomain.com address again. It should be created in your CRM now.
The Rule Deployment Wizard fails with some strange error message
This happens sometimes for unknown reasons. You can either debug it or work around the problem. Here's the workaround:
- Go to some workstation having Outlook installed.
- Log on as the crmincomingdata user.
- Setup Outlook to connect to the crmincomingdata mailbox on the Exchange server.
- Create a new rule (Chose to create a rule without a template) to forward all messages as an attachment to the crmmail mailbox.
- Close Outlook. Log Off.
- Test the setup sending an email from the outside to the crmincomingdata@yourdomain.com address.
- If that still isn't created in CRM, check the Application log on the Exchange server for error messages.