Acumatica Incoming Email Processing  

What happens when Acumatica sends an email out, then someone replies to it?

Well, I used to think that it went nowhere in Acumatica, but today I learned that's not the case.

Let's say you open a Purchase Order and note that there are no email activities attached.

Then you use REPORTS -> Print Purchase Order to view the printed Purchase Order and the SEND button to send it out as an email attachment.

The outbound email activity automatically gets attached to the Purchase Order. Note the (1) next to ACTIVITIES in this screenshot:

But maybe the email account that you setup in Acumatica is something like purchasing@mycompany.com, a generic email account that no one checks.

The vendor receives an email from purchasing@mycompany.com. But what happens if the vendor replies to the email? Well, I used to think that it went into the email inbox of the email account (of course), but that Acumatica didn't see it.

I knew about the INCOMING MAIL PROCESSING tab on the System Email Accounts (SM204002) screen, but I thought Acumatica only took action on an email if you checked something in addition to the Incoming Mail Processing check box.

That's where I was wrong.

Apparently the Incoming Mail Processing check box is all you need:

When Acumatica sends an email, it automatically adds a special code in brackets at the end of the subject. This is how it identifies that specific email:

So, if you checked the Incoming Mail Processing check box when you setup the email account, Acumatica will scan the inbox for emails containing that special code in the subject.

For those emails with special codes, Acumatica will attach them to the same record as the original email which in our case is a Purchase Order.

Note that Acumatica still imports all emails in the inbox. So this technique probably makes most sense with an email address like purchasing@mycompany.com where the inbox only contains email replies to email sent from Acumatica. But only the emails with special codes get attached to records in Acumatica, the rest just sit in Acumatica as clutter.

Make sure to select the Action of Send/Receive All on the Send and Receive Email (SM507010) screen so Acumatica will both send email and check the inbox of the email account.

I tested this by replying to the email that Acumatica sent from my regular mail client. Now I have two email activities attached to the Purchase Order which is pretty cool:

Note: If you want to test this out with a test email account, I suggest creating a Gmail account since it's free. Follow these instructions for how to setup a Gmail Account in Acumatica (click here).