Configuring POP3/IMAP Fetch for Google Apps Email Mailbox

[slippy62]

With the ever increasing popularity of Google Apps, I have finally kicked our Microsoft Exchange in to touch and fully embraced the 'do no evil' alternative. I'm almost there - but I can't for the life of me get the Support Suite to process mail sat in the new support mailbox (now hosted within Google Apps).

Previously, we had a POP3 service running externally (through a company called NamesCo) which allowed individual users to collect email on their workstations. They were connected to an Exchange server but this served only to backup mail centrally and to provide remote access on the rare occasions it was required.

One mailbox - support@domain.com was working beautifully with our Support Suite. The POP3 retrieval ran smoothly (although fell over if emails contained an attachment over 1Mb...) and outgoing email never failed.

It is important to say that I paid for professional installation for Kayako to configure the entire program, including the Cron, on our server... excellent job - hence I can confidently say that the Cron was running and has never been touched/change since.

Anyway, here's what I have done so far:

1. I setup a mailbox within Google Apps (support@domain.com) and verified that support emails are getting delivered (thus the MX records have updated correctly)
2. I enabled POP3 and IMAP in the mailbox settings, even changing the password to something very simple (as to avoid typos).
3. I referred to the Google Apps support page (Configuring POP and IMAP Access) and made sure that all of these settings were carried across on to the Admin part of the Support Suite.
4. For the incoming settings, I have tried pop.googlemail.com, pop.gmail.com, imap.googlemail.com and imap.gmail.com with and without SSL turned on - in effect every combination.
5. For the username I used support@domain.com and the very simple password.

... it just ain't working. I can't see where I have gone wrong. I have scoured the forums and the only similar problem experienced by others is trying to use Google to send mail via SMTP which requires an SSL connection - something that my version of the Support Suite does not support.

Any advice, guidance, step-by-step instructions would be great. I am sure that I am not the only one suffering - either now or in the future.

And that's why I posted this in the 'How Do I' section. It's a problem, but a common on for sure !

I appreciate any comments or help - the thought of having to face my development team tomorrow and admit that I broke their lifeline won't go down too well ! ;-)

[no0ne2k]

Were you ever able to get this working? I have made the transition to Google Apps for my domain as well -- and would like to migrate my POP/IMAP/SMTP functions as well.

Thanks!

[slippy62]

No I'm afraid that I am no further along with this. In the end I used our old POP3 account with NamesCo (Domain Names and Web Hosting - Domain Names, Hosting, Dedicated Server Solutions and Broadband ADSL, Namesco Limited) and this seems to work OK. We upgraded our main company domain to Google Apps and set up email forwarding from the main support email address to the .net version hosted with NamesCo.

We do have a problem with the Kayako support suite collecting messages and processing them if they are over 300kb in size. It causes message duplications on a loop until we manually log in to the webmail control panel and forward then delete the offending message (with an attachment).

The problem is not related to the NamesCo service, rather it's a bug with our version of Kayako. We are about 16 months behind the latest version though, so when we get around to the upgrade I am sure this will be fixed.

As for the Google Apps thing, we will get there one day I am sure, but for now I took the view that our support suite is too important to mess about with, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it... like most things in IT, it's better to leave something alone if you don't fully understand it, and as a small company we don't have the time to play around with this.

Sorry - but hope that explains our position.

[mblendinger]

I'm trying to use supportsuite with googleapps and do not work, the parser in the cron just load and load and never finished nor do nothing. So I will need to back to the normal local exim pop3 accounts as I was using for years,sadly the migration to googleapps was not possible due to some kayako problem