odoo Enterprise provides highly configurable email communication-processes. The whole email-conversation around a particular odoo object, for example, a Sales-Quotation between a sales-person and a customer, or even other participants such as a technician advising the sales-person with the Quotations, can be captured under the Quotation-document, and preserved for future reference. This obviously eliminates the reliance on individual mail-boxes of the participants in the conversation (customer, sales-person and technician), hence providing a single-point-of-reference.

odoo’s abilitites to facilitate and protocol mail conversations indeed cuts down the usage of regular Email programs like Outlook, Gmail etc., and facilitates the communication as a part of the business-process.

In the simplest sense, odoo can act as a central “router” to and from which mails are channeled. It then takes care of delivering the mails to the intended recipients, while at the same time saving a copy under the specific business-object (ex. a Quotation).

Setup odoo as an “Email-Router”

Main Mail Domain

For every instance of the ERP, a main mail-exchange domain has to be setup under Settings -> General Settings.

Incoming Email Servers

An incoming-email-server must be setup under Settings->General settings. Click on Configure the incoming email gateway and create a record for the server(s) which you utilize to receive mails. The incoming email-server can be either IMAP or POP3 servers; though we always recommend using IMAP.

The following details are required for setting up incoming-email.

Server Name: <like imap.gmail.com>
SSL / TLS: <True / False>
Username: <Your email>
Password: <Your email password>

Setting up an incoming email server

To how to set up your Incoming Email Server in odoo:

1. Go to Settings under Technical –> Incoming Email Server 
2. From the list of all Incoming Email Servers, click on Create to create a new Incoming Email Server and name it.
3. Server type can be selected as IMAP, POP or local. Gmail uses either POP3 or IMAP to fetch emails.
4. To set up the Incoming Email Server, you will need your Server Details. SMTP server address as imap.gmail.com is used for Gmail. It is always recommendable to use IMAP.
5. IMAP uses Port 993 and POP uses Port 995.
6. Check the field SSL/TLS for encrypted emails.
7. Enter your Gmail login credentials i.e. username as your email and password will be your Gmail password.
8. As a final step, test your connection and save your record.

As for setting up IMAP, this is how you can do it. The first thing to do is check whether IMAP is turned on. Then go to your Gmail in Settings. In Settings, click the Forwarding the POP/IMAP tab. Once you are in, from the “IMAP access” section, select “Enable IMAP and save your changes.

Outgoing email servers

You can set up an outgoing mail server at Settings -> General settings. Click on Configure outgoing mail servers and create a record for the SMTP server through which will be responsible for sending emails.

Following details are required for sending emails through your company’s SMTP server:

SMTP Server and Port: 
Username: <smtp_username> 
Password: <smtp_password> 
Connection security : TLS/ SSL

Setting up an outgoing email server

To set up your Outgoing Email Server:

1. Go to Settings under Technical –> Outgoing Email Server.
2. From the list of all Outgoing Email Servers, click on Create to create a new Outgoing Email Server.
3. Name it and give it a description.
4. Enter your SMTP server name i.e smtp.gmail.com in the Connection Information field.
5. Here you can also set the priority of your email server as 1. The higher the priority and lower number is used. So the email server with the lowest number will be most often used.
6. For the port of SMTP server, set up the post as 465 for Gmail.
7. Foe type of security, select SSL/TLS for Gmail.
8. As your username, you use your email account, the password will be your Gmail password.
9. As a final step, test your connection and save your record.

Common issues that may occur

1. Connection test failed: Here is what we got instead: 535.
Solution: Make sure that your Gmail account’s username and password are correct.

2. Connection test failed: Here is what we got instead: 534.
Solution: Make sure that your Gmail account allows less secure apps connection. Go to your Google account-> Security ->Less secure app access. Turn on access.

3. Connection test failed: Here is what we got instead: 11002.
Solution: Make sure SMTP server field is set correctly.

4. The email is configured correctly but the system doesn’t send any emails.
Solution: Make sure Priority in configuration is set to 1.

If you still get errors after all these configurations, then in your odoo go to Settings -> General Settings. Select External Email Server and speficy your mail’s domain as presented in the following image:

After this step, user’s real email address needs to be inserted and aliases must be created in odoo as shown in the following images:

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that G Suite email has its own security settings for outgoing messages. Hence, whichever company uses G Suite, security settings can be applied to outgoing messages.

Configuring Mailboxes and Aliases

It is general practice to configure mailboxes on your corporate email-server at departmental level, such as Sales, Purchases etc. Examples of such mailboxes would be:

• sales@mycompany.com
• einkauf@..
• support@..
• buchhaltung@..
• logistik@..
• projects@..
• marketing@
• ..

In addition to these departmental addresses, it is useful to configure one general system-wide-valid mailbox to capture every possible email addressed to the ERP. This mailbox is often referred to the catchall@ Mailbox.

Alias Addresses

In addition to departmental mailboxes, it is possible to dedicate specific aliases based on specific intended purpose or target. For instance, it is sometimes beneficial to dedicate mail-addresses to specific projects, ex. if your marketing team is working on upgrading your corporate website (and are organizing their efforts using an odoo Project: Website Upgrade), they can center all their communication around the mail-address website-upgrade@mycompany.com. This address would only be an alias to the main marketing mailbox marketing@...

Importantly the alias website-upgrade@ is attached specifically to the Project: Website Upgrade. This way you will not need to create a new mailbox on the corporate mail-server per project, rather only dedicate aliases. This obviously reduces management overheads on the mail-server, still allowing to handle communication for 10’s of projects by just issuing mail-aliases like project1@,project2@ etc. Based on these aliases, odoo will then know to which business objects e-mails should be routed.

Triggering Actions when Sending or Receiving Email

Since odoo acts as a routing instance for Email, it is possible to setup “action triggers” in the ERP based on incoming and outgoing emails.

For example, if the ERP receives an Email at the address sales@mycompany.com with a subject “Please send Price-List”, an action can be triggered to log a Lead in the CRM, and at the same-time, send a standard Pricelist-PDF-File to the website visitor.

Alerts

odoo’s powerful mail-system can release alerts based on the condition of certain business processes or data. For example, the system can automatically triggers an email to a the Purchasing-Team/responsible if the stock of a certain product goes below a threshold level, so that the product can be re-stocked. Similarly, if a sales-person is dealing with a lot of leads/opportunities, odoo can help him with a reminder of a list of leads/opportunities which haven’t received in a longer time.

Mailbox Parity

When odoo’s email-capabilities are introduced in early stages of a rollout, users ask us if every mail transacted to/from odoo can also be found on their Outlook or Gmail client (based on a corporate mailbox such as user1@mycompany.com).

This is possible by allowing individual users to save their IMAP-settings under their user-preferences. Using these preferences, when a mail is sent out of odoo, it writes a copy to the Outbox of the specific user’s corporate mailbox. Incoming mails to user1@mycompany.com land in the users’s Inbox, as they always had.