E-mail environment

To use e-mail you need an SMTP server and an IMAP or POP-3 server. It's highly recommended to choose an IMAP Daemon with Maildir format. IMAP offers more functionality then POP-3. For example the use of multiple folders. POP-3 was not designed for a webapplication such as Group-Office while IMAP is.
There are two different storage formats for e-mail. These formats are mbox and maildir. It's higly recommended to use maildir format. With mbox format all e-mail messages are stored in one single plain text file. You can imagine that this is not very efficient when you have hundreds or thousands of e-mails in a mailbox. With Maildir the messages are stored in a much smarter way which doesn't cause the system to slow down when the mailbox size grows. With mbox format it's also not possible to create subfolders inside folders that contain messages. A folder contains either subfolders or messages but not both. To summarize maildir is faster and offers more flexibility.

Automatic reply

For 2.17-stable-8 and higher

If the e-mail server runs at the same machine ('localhost') as Group-Office it's possible to setup an automatic reply. This is useful for example when you are at vacation. To make use of this feature you need the following software on your server:

1. vacation
2. sudo
3. php Comand Line Interface
4. An SMTP server or Mail Delivery Agent (like procmail) that uses “.forward” files in the home directory of the system users. SMTP server such as Postfix and Sendmail do this by default.

You must setup sudo to allow apache to run action.php as root to create the .forward files. Run 'visudo' and enter this line:

Replace "www-data" with your webserver user. Perhaps "apache".

Now we have to tell Group-Office that we use the system vacation program to send automatic replies. This should be done in config.php. Change or enter the following value:

Now there's a new tab called 'Automatic reply' in the e-mail account settings page. The account's hostname must be 'localhost' because it can only work if the mailserver runs on the same machine. To get there:

E-mail -> Accounts -> Double click your account -> Automatic reply

Note: if it's not working and you have the Automatic reply tab, try executing this command in the system shell and see if it outputs errors. (If it is successful this will enable the automatic reply for the e-mail account with id=1 in the database):

For older versions

If the e-mail server runs at the same machine as Group-Office it's possible to setup an automatic reply. This is useful for example when you are at vacation. To make use of this feature you must use IMAP authentication with use of system users ( See chapter 3.1) and the SMTP server must use “.forward” files in the home directory of the system users. SMTP server such as Postfix and Sendmail do this by default.
You must setup a “cron” job to execute a PHP script called “groupoffice-cron.php”. To execute this PHP script on the commandline you need to install the PHP Comand Line Interface (PHP CLI).
To open the cron task list type the following in the command shell:

Add the following line and modify the path to match the location of your Group-Office installation.