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+++ title = "Scan Mailboxes" weight = 70 [extra] mktoc = true +++
User that provide valid email (imap) settings, can import mails from their mailbox into docspell periodically.
You need first define imap settings, please see this page.
Go to User Settings -> Scan Mailbox Task. You can define periodic tasks that connects to your mailbox and import mails into docspell. It is possible to define multiple tasks, for example, if you have multiple e-mail accounts you want to import periodically.
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Details
Creating a task requires the following information:
{{ figure(file="scanmailbox-detail.png") }}
You can enable or disable this task. A disabled task will not run
periodically. You can still choose to run it manually if you click the
Start Once button.
Then you need to specify which IMAP connection to use.
A list of folders is required. Docspell will only look into these folders. You can specify multiple folders. The "Inbox" folder is a special folder, which will usually appear translated in your web-mail client. You can specify "INBOX" case insensitive, it will then read mails in your inbox. Any other folder is usually case-sensitive (depends on the imap server, but usually they are case sensitive except the INBOX folder). Type in a folder name and click the add button on the right.
Then the field Received Since Hours defines how many hours to go back and look for mails. Usually there are many mails in your inbox and importing them all at once is not feasible or desirable. It can work together with the Schedule field below. For example, you could run this task all 6 hours and read mails from 8 hours back.
The next two settings tell docspell what to do once a mail has been submitted to docspell. It can be moved into another folder in your mail account. This moves it out of the way for the next run. You can also choose to delete the mail, but note that it will really be deleted and not moved to your trash folder. If both options are off, nothing happens with that mail, it simply stays (and could be re-read on the next run).
When docspell creates an item from a mail, it needs to set a direction
value (incoming or outgoing). If you know that all mails you want to
import have a specific directon, then you can set it here. Otherwise,
automatic means that docspell chooses a direction based on the
From header of a mail. If the From header is an e-mail address
that belongs to a “concerning” person in your address book, then it is
set to "outgoing". Otherwise it is set to "incoming". To support this,
you need to add your own e-mail address(es) to your address book.
The Item Folder setting is used to put all items that are created from mails into the specified folder. If you define a folder here, where you are not a member, you won't find resulting items.
The last field is the Schedule which defines when and how often this
task should run. The syntax is similiar to a date-time string, like
2019-09-15 12:32, where each part is a pattern to also match multple
values. The ui tries to help a little by displaying the next two
date-times this task would execute. A more in depth help is available
here. For
example, to execute the task every monday at noon, you would write:
Mon *-*-* 12:00. A date-time part can match all values (*), a list
of values (e.g. 1,5,12,19) or a range (e.g. 1..9). Long lists may
be written in a shorter way using a repetition value. It is written
like this: 1/7 which is the same as a list with 1 and all
multiples of 7 added to it. In other words, it matches 1, 1+7,
1+7+7, 1+7+7+7 and so on.
Reading Mails twice / Duplicates
Since users can move around mails in their mailboxes, it can happen that docspell unintentionally reads a mail multiple times. If docspell reads a mail, it will first check if an item already exists that originated from this mail. It only proceeds to import it, if it cannot find any. If you deleted an item in the meantime, docspell would import the mail again.
This check uses the
Message-ID of an e-mail.
This is usually there and should identify a complete mail. But it
won't catch duplicate mails, that are sent multiple times - they might
have different Message-IDs. Also some mails have no such ids and are
then imported from docspell without any checks.
In later versions, docspell may use the checksum of the generated eml file to look for duplicates, too.
How it works
Docspell will go through all folders and download mails in “batches”. This size can be set by the admin in the configuration file and applies to all these tasks (same for all users). This batch only contains the mail headers and not the complete mail.
Then each mail is downloaded completely one by one and converted into an eml file which is then submitted to docspell. Then the usual processing machinery starts, just like uploading an eml file via the webapp.
The number of folders and the number of mails to import can be limited by an admin via the config file. Note that this limit applies to one task run only, it is meant to reduce resource allocation of one task.