AndroNautic includes a built-in e-mail integration in its back-office. This allows its clients to exchange e-mails with their customers and have them automatically linked to reservations, proposals, and others. For their convenience, the clients of AndroNautic are instructed to use a dedicated e-mail account for this purpose, which is mandatory when using the POP3 protocol to download e-mails.

Moreover, you can also configure user-specific email accounts in the back-office, which serve a different purpose but share the same configuration steps. The company-wide e-mail account is configured via the "Configuration > My profile > Mail credentials" menu option. The user-specific e-mail account is configured via the "Configuration > Users > Mail credentials" menu option.

To manually configure your e-mail account, you need to ask your e-mail service provider for the necessary details, or take them from its support area. When doing so, you will notice that there is only one protocol to send emails, SMTP, but two options to download e-mails from its servers, IMAP and POP3.

Choosing between IMAP and POP3

POP3 works by establishing a connection with the email service and downloading all new emails onto the endpoint (i.e., AndroNautic). Once the download is completed, the emails are typically erased from the service, unless the administrator modifies the configuration. Hence, a dedicated e-mail account using POP3 is more suited for users who primarily access their email from the AndroNautic back-office when dealing with customers, reservations and proposals and want to keep a clean inbox.

IMAP is best suited for clients who also want to access their email from other devices, such as personal computers or smartphones. It allows for more sophisticated management of email messages, such as organizing them into folders on the server and synchronising them across multiple endpoints. However, the AndroNautic back-office will not behave as a native IMAP client, but instead it will download and store a local copy of e-mails to speed up searches and loading times.

Manual configuration

Once you have obtained the necessary configuration details and credentials from your email service provider, go to the appropriate option in the backoffice and fill in the required form.

Common settings

• E-mail address: your email address, e.g., address@example.com.
• Password: your password.

Send email

• Hostname: usually something like smtp.domain.com.
• Security: SSL/TLS or STARTTLS.
• Username: usually, but not necessarily, your email address.
• Port: usually, but not necessarily, 465 when using SSL/TLS or 587 when using STARTTLS.
• Authentication method: Normal.

Download email

• Protocol: POP3 or IMAP.
• Hostname: usually something like mail.domain.com.
• Security: SSL/TLS.
• Username: usually, but not necessarily, your email address.
• Port: usually, but not necessarily, 995 when using POP3 and 993 when using IMAP.
• Authentication method: Normal.

Finally, save the changes. The interface should test the configuration and let you know of any mistakes.

Note: the feature that tests the correctness of the data is being developed as of the 19th of July of 2024 and is expected to be released before the end of the year.