Working with mailboxes

Mailbox types

There are two types of mailboxes:

• personal mailboxes are mailboxes for individual users.
  By default, every user of an application built on Nuxeo CMF has a personal mailbox.
• generic mailboxes are mailboxes for groups of users, such as a unit, team or a manager group of a company or an organization.

The presentation and management of mailboxes works the same for personal and generic mailboxes.

Mailbox profile

Mailboxes can also have a profile. A single profile called "Case creation" is available in the default application which enables the manual creation of cases in the mailbox. Mailboxes without this profile will receive distributed cases and users will be able to perform all the actions on the documents (distribution, edition, classification), however, users won't be able to create new cases from this mailbox.

Mailbox views

Mailboxes display several different views for cases to distinguish between draft cases, sent cases and distributed cases. The views are shown as tabs.
Below you can see the currently available views:

• Inbox: this tab displays all the cases distributed to the mailbox, for action and for information.
  
• Sent: this tab displays all the cases that were distributed from the mailbox.
  
• Draft: this tab displays the cases created in the mailbox and not yet sent.
  
• Service mailbox : this tab displays the cases distributed to the affiliated mailboxes.
  

Mailbox synchronization

If you connect your user directory to Nuxeo CMF for user management, you may want the mailboxes to be synchronized with your user directory as well.
This enables automatic creation of mailboxes from directory groups instead of having them created manually one by one. The mailboxes are updated every time the synchronizer is run.

Synchronizing your mailboxes with your directory doesn't mean that all mailboxes will have to be created and updated by the synchronizer. You can still create mailboxes manually.
Mailboxes have a "Synchronizer state" metadata that indicates if the mailbox has been synchronized with the directory. There are 3 states available:

• synchronized: this is the state of the mailbox after it has been updated by the synchronizer.
• unsynchronized: this is the state of mailboxes created manually and whose name doesn't correspond to any group in the directory. Mailboxes created manually and whose name corresponds to a group or a user in the directory will go from "unsynchronized" to "synchronized" when the synchronizer is run.
• doublon: this state is used for mailboxes that were created manually, corresponding to a group in the directory but that we don't want to be synchronized with the directory information (doublon=redundant/duplicate)

Mailboxes have synchronization metadata that are automatically updated by the synchronizer. The metadata are:

• Last synchronization: last time the mailbox was synchronized with the directory
• Origin: the name of the directory with which the mailbox is synchronized. This field is empty in the case of an unsynchronized mailbox.
• synchronizer ID: ID that enables the synchronizer to link the mailbox to the directory entry.