This blog series aims to expand your knowledge of CiviCRM and its potential for extensions. Each month, we present one of the many extensions we at SYSTOPIA have developed over the years. This month’s feature: The Mailbox Mailing Extension – allowing you to create and schedule CiviCRM mailings without needing to use the CiviCRM user interface.
A huge thank you to Thomas Fastermann of the Schweizerischer Gewerkschaftsbund for contributing to our blog series by writing this month’s release!
Who is it for?
The Mailbox Mailing Extension is useful for organizations that handle bulk mailings and want to allow specific senders to create a bulk mailing not through the CiviCRM interface, but simply by sending an email. Thanks to this extension, authorized senders do not need access to the CiviCRM backend for this task.
What does it do?
The extension provides a way to connect shared mailboxes to CiviCRM. These mailboxes are configured to be scanned for incoming massages regularly, which allows to create and send CiviCRM mailings by e-mail. These mailings will be sent to a configurable group of recipients without using the CiviCRM user interface. By defining different profiles, you can configure different tasks with specifically dedicated senders and recipients.
Some of the features are:
- Configurable mailboxes (or folders within a single mailbox) to be used as mailing lists
- Regular scanning and processing of mailings via cron job
- Support for file attachments and multipart e-mail
- Bounce processing and reporting to the mailing author
- Configurable allowed senders and recipients using CiviCRM groups
How does it work?
The Mailbox Mailing Extension works with any IMAP or POP3 mail server. Once configured correctly and activated through a cron job, CiviCRM will regularly scan the mailbox for new emails and, if the defined criteria are met, create and send a new bulk mailing.
For example, you could configure the extension to allow a selected group of team members to send emails to all members of the team. In this scenario, you would create a CiviCRM group for members allowed to send those emails (let’s call it “Teammail – senders”). Then, create the recipient group with all team members in it (let’s call it “Teammail”). Next, set up an email address that senders will use for team emails (e.g., teammails@example.com). After creating this new IMAP or POP3 mailbox, you configure the Mailbox Mailing Extension with the relevant settings, defining the sender and recipient groups. From that point, every email sent by an allowed team member to teammails@example.com will be converted into a new CiviCRM mailing and sent to all team members. If you enable this option, the mailing will also be archived.
Mailbox Mailing settings 
Edit Mailbox 
New schedulded job
Anything else?
Of course, the extension verifies if the sender is allowed to send to the group; otherwise, the email will be ignored. For known contacts who are not permitted to send, you can optionally set up an automatic reply explaining why their email was not processed.
Additionally, you can define how senders will be notified if there are any bounce responses to the CiviCRM mailing they created.
Links
- Mailbox Mailing in the extensions directory
- Mailbox Mailing on Github
- Mailbox Mailing on docs.civicrm.org
