How do Oracle Service Cloud mailboxes relate to POP3 mail accounts and mail servers?
Environment:
Mailboxes
Resolution:
In the Service application, mailboxes configured in the Mailboxes table allow email to be brought into your site and be converted into an incident to be handled by your support agents. These mailboxes must be configured correctly with regard to a specific interface in order to access the appropriate email and create incidents from those emails.
Note: As of the August 2014 release, Oracle RightNow CX is referred to as Oracle B2C Service.
In general, one mail server can hold any number of unique mailboxes. Each standard POP3 mail account has three basic characteristics that identify it as a unique mailbox:
- the account name (or username)
- the password
- the name of the mail server itself
To retrieve mail messages from the mailbox, the mailbox owner must use a POP3 mail client, such as Outlook. For this to happen, the mail client must be preconfigured with the characteristics of the mail account; namely, the username, password, and the name of the mail server it is on.
Knowing this information, the mail client can contact the specified mail server, give it the username and the password, and the mail server then allows the client to access messages waiting in that mailbox.
Like a standard email client, Service has the ability to access a mailbox and retrieve incoming email messages. This is because Service has its own mail client application—a special utility called Techmail that runs approximately every fifteen minutes (unless using Techmail On Demand), and accesses one or more mailboxes, retrieves new messages, and turns them into incidents on your site. These incidents are then viewed and handled from the administrative side of your Oracle B2C Service application.
The Techmail utility is somewhat complex, but the method it uses to access a POP3 mail account is identical to the method used by other mail clients. Techmail must know the username, the password, and the mail server name for each mailbox it accesses.
This is what you specify when you configure a general Service mailbox in Oracle Service Cloud. The username is specified in the POP Account field, the password in the Password field, and the mail server's name goes in the POP Server field. Keep in mind that the mailbox Name field has no functional value for accessing the mailbox. It is only used as a label, so you can easily identify each mailbox in the list.
Note: If your mailbox is hosted with Oracle B2C Service, Oracle can provide you with the mailbox's POP account, POP server, and password. Submit an incident for this information. Mailboxes are a chargeable item. If you do not have any available mailboxes and would like to purchase additional mailboxes, please contact your account manager. If your mailbox is hosted on your own servers, contact your own organization's mail administrator for your mailbox information.
Oracle-managed Service mailboxes can be created in the Oracle Cloud Portal - Configuration Assistant self-service tool. See the following for more information:
Answer ID 7537: Oracle B2C Service Configuration Assistant on Oracle Cloud Portal
Answer ID 6354: Adding, deleting or configuring Oracle-managed Service mailboxes
With Oracle-managed Service mailboxes, Oracle configures crucial incoming email settings for you and then you can edit the mailbox fields that are used to brand your mailbox. Additional information regarding setting up mailboxes is available in Answer ID 331: Setting up mailboxes in Oracle B2C Service.
When configuring multiple mailboxes, each mailbox configuration specified in the Mailboxes table must correspond to a unique mailbox. You should never have more than one mailbox in this list with the same POP Account and POP Server values. By applying the appropriate username and password combination to each mailbox configuration, Techmail can access each mailbox and create incidents from the various mailboxes.
