ManualEmailConfig

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SETTING UP THE MAIL GATEWAY

The mail gateway is used to receive mail messages into an RT instance; outbound mail is usually just handed off to the local SMTP sending program, or a specified SMTP smarthost.

The mail gateway requires the web UI to be set up and functional. If you intend to use SSL to secure your mail gateway, you need to make sure that lib-www-perl, a.k.a LWP, is built with SSL support.

1) Documentation for setting up the mail gateway can be found by typing:

perldoc /<path to installed program>/rt-mailgate

(For Debian, the default path is /usr/bin.) The rt-mailgate program is installed in /opt/rt4/bin by default, so that command will probably be, more specifically:

perldoc /opt/rt4/bin/rt-mailgate

unless you've moved your install (not build) directory.

2) You need to tell your Mail Transfer Agent (e.g. sendmail, postfix, or qmail) how to forward messages to RT's mail gateway. To do this, create an aliases in your system's mail aliases file. Here's an example, which routes mail to the mailbox [=rt@example.com] (and [=rt-comment@example.com]) into new tickets in the RT queue named General. Note that the queue name is case-insensitive.

Add the following lines to /etc/aliases (or your local equivalent such as /etc/mail/aliases):

rt: "|/opt/rt4/bin/rt-mailgate --queue general --action correspond --url http://localhost/rt"

rt-comment: "|/opt/rt4/bin/rt-mailgate --queue general --action comment --url http://localhost/rt"

(Replace /opt/rt4 by your RT installation path and http://localhost/rt by the URL of your RT installation on your webserver)

NOTE: When you add the above each alias entry should be all one line; make sure you include the quotes.

NOTE: qmail users should follow the QMail link to review caveats about fastforward command aliases.

Replace general with the name of your queue and rt (before the colon in the alias) with the email address you wish people to send their messages to. You might, for example, have messages to support go into the service queue, and abuse go into the ops queue. You can have more than one set of aliases point to the same queue, if, for example, you wanted mail to both abuse and security both go to the ops queue.

The queue name may have spaces. rt-mailgate works as well with them, but do not forget to escape these spaces by enclosing the queue name in single quote:

my-queue: "|/opt/rt4/bin/rt-mailgate --queue 'My Queue' --action correspond --url http://localhost/"

If you are using the default sendmail included in most redhat distro's you will most likely need to copy (cp) rt-mailgate to /etc/smrsh or create a symbolic link and change /opt/rt4/bin above to /etc/smrsh or sendmail will complain. These sendmails will only execute programs as alias targets which have been blessed by placing them in a special directory. This is not necessary for Exim or postfix.

You'll choose from "--action correspond" and "--action comment" depending on whether the mail should be resent to the requestor. If you want the requestor to see it, choose correspond; if you want to keep it from the requestor, choose comment.

The URL will be the URL for RT's web interface, such as http://issues.bestpractical.com/, =; whatever is the root of your RT install.

3) Stop and start your mail server, so it picks up your configuration changes. With sendmail or postfix (possibly others), you usually also need to type the command "newaliases" to get the server to recognize the new aliases. If this command is unrecognized, it's probably not in your default path; a common location is "/usr/sbin/newaliases".

4) Change the password. The default root password for the web interface is password, as installed. Changing this should be the first thing you do after installation.

You can have the mail gateway on your MX or some other server and have it talk to RT via HTTP. For more details, see InstallMailgateOnly.

To configure a mail transfer agent (postfix) to post tickets to RT4 on a separate server ....

#(download and un-tar RT)
./configure
make sbin-install
make bin-install (where rt-mailgate lives)
make libs-install

Add the following lines to /etc/aliases (or your local equivalent such as /etc/mail/aliases):

rt: "|/<path-to-mailgate>/rt-mailgate --queue general --action correspond --url http://<the-URL-of-the-RT-server>/"
rt-comment: "|/<path-to-mailgate>/rt-mailgate --queue general --action comment --url http://<the-URL-of-the-RT-server>/"

The link to RT is now configured. However, the rt-mailgate script is a perl script which requires support. On a fresh SuSE 9.3 server install, the following was needed to provide the necessary perl libraries (someone with deeper knowledge may know of a more restrictive set of libraries, but these worked).

#(install gcc and glibc, if necessary)
perl -MCPAN -eshell (to configure CPAN)
perl -MCPAN -e 'install("LWP")'
perl -MCPAN -e 'install("Bundle::LWP")'

If Using SSL, add:

perl -MCPAN -e 'install("Crypt::SSLeay")'

To test the connection...

echo 'hello' | mail -s "Test subject" rt

If you get a "command died with status 1" error message, the rt-mailgate script possibly doesn't have the execute bit set for the user/group under which postfix is running.

chmod o+x /<path-to-mailgate>/rt-mailgate

For more information on configuring your mail gateway, see ManualAdministration

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