Email Configuration

This article covers configuring and X2CRM for sending (and, in special cases, receiving) email.

Introduction

X2CRM provides the means to send email, natively, within the web application. Furthermore, with Professional Edition, the local MTA on the web server (if any) can be configured to pass emails to X2CRM to be automatically parsed, imported into the web application, and associated with the addressee's contact record.

Sending Mail

There are four options for methods of sending email, which can be found by going to Email Settings under the Email Configuration section in the Admin page:

1. PHP Mail
2. Sendmail
3. QMail
4. SMTP

PHP Mail, Sendmail and QMail each, while independent of any offsite, third-party service, require that an MTA be available on the web server. The main difference is that PHP Mail uses whichever MTA that PHP itself is configured to use, whereas Sendmail and QMail are specific to Exim4/Postfix and QMail MTA's (respectively). You can check that PHP is at least configured for using an MTA using requirements.php. For all instances of X2CRM Professional Edition cloud/ondemand, the methods available for sending mail include all of these except QMail.

Circumventing Spam Filters

While the non-SMTP methods for sending email within X2CRM may work immediately, a common problem encountered with them is that email goes into spam folders on the receiving end, or is not being received at all. This is especially likely to happen when the email addresses specified by users in their profiles (which get used as the sender address in the headers of mail sent by X2CRM) do not belong to the same domain as the server hosting X2CRM. So, for example, it would be problematic if a user uses an email address in their X2CRM profile that ends in gmail.com, and the CRM system and MTA are on example123.com

This is not a fault in X2CRM (or PHPMailer, which X2CRM uses for mail delivery). Rather, it is due to how the general proliferation of email spam through various means (but especially scripts running on web servers) has resulted in greatly elevated standards in spam-detection mechanisms and heuristics of all reputable email servers. This poses an entry barrier to avoiding spam filters, and this is common to all web applications (i.e. Wordpress, Drupal, etc.), not just X2CRM. It is thus recommended that, before utilizing any method of X2CRM besides SMTP, measures are taken to ensure that mail sent will have the best chance of avoiding spam filters.

Work-around 1: Aliasing

This works by first creating mail forwarding aliases on the server, i.e. through a Virtualmin or CPanel control interface, or manually, by editing the MTA's virtual user aliases table (see their respective documentation for more information). Next, instruct all users to use these email addresses as their contact address in their X2CRM profile, so that when contacts reply, the response emails will be forwarded to the desired addresses (or even a list of addresses) specified by each alias.

This is the recommended method for users of X2CRM Professional Edition cloud/ondemand. The hosting environment has the OpenDKIM signing service running on it, and the mail server has been configured to sign all email being sent from all subdomains of x2vps.com. See #Using_DKIM for more information

Work-around 2: Migration

This, of course, is the most straightforward solution: to use the hosting provider's email service. However, it requires switching from one's existing email service/addresses to service and addresses provided by the hosting provider, and it is also extra effort.

Work-around 3: SMTP

Using this method, the entire organization that uses X2CRM sends email using a single email account managed by a third-party service that supports SMTP.

Using DKIM

(see main article on Wikipedia)

This method, which requires server-end configuration, is a very secure and reliable method of distinguishing email as being of legitimate and trustworthy origin. Almost every reputable email service is configured to use a mail signing agent to add a special signature sent from such addresses, in addition to checking signatures in incoming emails. Emails that are digitally signed are far more likely to be recognized by mail servers worldwide as being from a reputable source, and thus less likely to go be caught in spam filters.

However, it still requires that the sender's email address be of the same domain as the email server. That is because the sender address cannot be "spoofed" due to how DKIM was designed; it was meant to prevent this sort of activity, which is common among spammers. Furthermore, if outgoing email is signed for domains not corresponding to the point of origin, it may actually make matters worse; many reputable mail services, i.e. GMail, themselves use DKIM. Thus, if a DKIM signature header is added to the email, and the signature does not match the DKIM record of the origin address's domain, it will be considered a forgery attempt by email servers that recognize DKIM and thus blocked or filtered by default. DKIM uses the RSA public/private key cryptographic technique to ensure that signatures are secure and cannot be forged, and thus there is no legitimate way of circumventing this issue.