Good afternoon,

My name is Michiel Beijen and I am a software consultant from The
Netherlands. I have been working with service management software since 2002
now. I used to work at a company that sold pretty expensive enterprise-class
service management software, BMC Remedy ITSM, as an implementation
consultant. Since about a year now I'm a freelance consultant. My field is
business information management, which covers subjects such as change
management, demand management, requirements specification, but also testing
and training. I also do (ITIL based) process management, -implementation and
-optimization at customers.

In my opinion that OTRS is quite a powerful tool which already has a lot of
the capabilities the commercial tool which I used to work with before had.
Out of curiosity, and also because I think OTRS has great potential and I
may be able to implement it at some customer in the future, I am now toying
around with OTRS for quite some time, and answering questions on the mailing
list here and there.

I have created a new mail backend for OTRS to be able to communicate to
servers that only allow 'Secure' SMTP; that is, SMTP servers that only allow
SSL or TLS connections. An example of such a server is the server for Google
Apps users, smtp.google.com. I use Google Apps for Domains for the email of
my company.

In bugzilla there are a couple of bugs that seem to be related to the lack
of support for 'secure SMTP': 3041, 3363, 3394 and 3612.

The implementation is pretty straight forward. It uses the perl module
Net::SMTP::SSL which is just a CPAN module. The module has the exact same
implementation as Net::SMTP; so I found out I only had to copy and rename
the Kernel/System/Email/SMTP.pm file and modify it a little bit to get it
working. I have tested it and for me, it works. I have included the new
file, and also patches to Framework.xml with slightly better wording
(English only!) and I've updated otrs.checkModules to also search for
Net::SMTP::SSL and Authen::SASL which are both needed to talk to SMTP hosts
such as smtp.google.com

I'm not a Perl wizard like you guys are, I'm not that technical - usually I
would be the person communicating between the users and the developers.
That's why I do not have an idea what should go in the $Id: tag in the
document. Can you look at that?
And also, can you please look at my modifications and consider them for
inclusion?

I have also created an enhancement request, bug 3630 in Bugzilla, for this
issue with the files attached.

I would love to hear any comments, thoughts or other remarks on this small
patch, either via this list or offline, my contact details are below.

In the future I might submit some more work. As I said, since I'm not a
developer, these will more likely be updates and enhancements to the
documentation or things like that.
I already noticed the documentation is published on CVS. Should I send
updates to the CVS documentation to this list?

Kind regards,
--
Michiel Beijen
Software Consultant
+31 6 - 457 42 418
Bee Free IT + http://beefreeit.nl
### Eclipse Workspace Patch 1.0
#P otrs
Index: Kernel/Config/Files/Framework.xml
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/cvs/otrs/Kernel/Config/Files/Framework.xml,v
retrieving revision 1.193
diff -u -r1.193 Framework.xml
--- Kernel/Config/Files/Framework.xml   13 Jan 2009 12:02:42 -0000      1.193
+++ Kernel/Config/Files/Framework.xml   2 Feb 2009 13:03:38 -0000
@@ -409,7 +409,7 @@
         </Setting>
     </ConfigItem>
     <ConfigItem Name="SendmailModule" Required="1" Valid="1">
-        <Description Lang="en">Module to send emails. "Sendmail" directly uses 
the sendmail binary of your operating system. "SMTP" uses a specified 
(external) mailserver. "DoNotSendEmail" is not sending emails and useful for 
test systems.</Description>
+        <Description Lang="en">Module to send emails. "Sendmail" directly uses 
the sendmail binary of your operating system. "SMTP" uses a specified 
(external) mailserver. "SecureSMTP" uses SSL or TLS encryption to connect to 
your external mailserver, which is required by some servers. "DoNotSendEmail" 
is not sending emails and useful for test systems.</Description>
         <Description Lang="de">Modul zum Versenden von Emails. "Sendmail" 
verwendet das sendmail-Binary Ihres Betriebssystems. "SMTP" versendet die 
Nachrichten ber einen externen Mailserver. "DoNotSendEmail" versendet keine 
Email und ist ntzlich um in Test-System den Emailversans zu 
deaktivieren.</Description>
         <Group>Framework</Group>
         <SubGroup>Core::Sendmail</SubGroup>
@@ -427,7 +427,7 @@
         </Setting>
     </ConfigItem>
     <ConfigItem Name="SendmailModule::Host" Required="1" Valid="1">
-        <Description Lang="en">If "SMTP" was selected for SendmailModule you 
have to specify the mailhost that sends out the mails.</Description>
+        <Description Lang="en">If you selected "SMTP" or "SecureSMTP" as 
SendmailModule, you have to specify the mailhost that sends out the 
mails.</Description>
         <Description Lang="de">Wenn Sie fr SendmailModule "SMTP" ausgwhlt 
haben, mssen Sie hier den Mailserver angeben, der zum Versenden von Nachrichten 
genutzt werden soll.</Description>
         <Group>Framework</Group>
         <SubGroup>Core::Sendmail</SubGroup>
@@ -436,7 +436,7 @@
         </Setting>
     </ConfigItem>
     <ConfigItem Name="SendmailModule::Port" Required="0" Valid="0">
-        <Description Lang="en">If "SMTP" was selected for SendmailModule 
specify the port where your mailserver is listening for incoming 
connections.</Description>
+        <Description Lang="en">If you selected "SMTP" or "SecureSMTP" as 
SendmailModule, specify the port where your mailserver is listening for 
incoming connections. If you're using "SMTP" this will default to port 25. If 
you're using "SecureSMTP" you most probably will need to specify port 465. 
</Description>
         <Description Lang="de">Wenn Sie fr SendmailModule den Wert "SMTP" 
ausgewhlt haben, knnen Sie hier den Port angeben, auf dem Ihr Mailserver Mails 
entgegennimmt.</Description>
         <Group>Framework</Group>
         <SubGroup>Core::Sendmail</SubGroup>
@@ -445,7 +445,7 @@
         </Setting>
     </ConfigItem>
     <ConfigItem Name="SendmailModule::AuthUser" Required="0" Valid="0">
-        <Description Lang="en">If "SMTP" was selected for SendmailModule and 
you need to authenticate to your mailserver, specify the username.</Description>
+        <Description Lang="en">If you selected "SMTP" or "SecureSMTP" as 
SendmailModule and you need to authenticate to your mailserver, specify the 
username.</Description>
         <Description Lang="de">Wenn Sie fr SendmailModule den Wert "SMTP" 
ausgewhlt haben und sich an Ihrem Mailserver anmelden mssen, geben Sie hier 
bitte den Benutzernamen fr die Authentifizierung an.</Description>
         <Group>Framework</Group>
         <SubGroup>Core::Sendmail</SubGroup>
@@ -454,7 +454,7 @@
         </Setting>
     </ConfigItem>
     <ConfigItem Name="SendmailModule::AuthPassword" Required="0" Valid="0">
-        <Description Lang="en">If "SMTP" was selected for SendmailModule and 
you need to authenticate to your mailserver, specify the password.</Description>
+        <Description Lang="en">If you selected "SMTP" or "SecureSMTP" as 
SendmailModule and you need to authenticate to your mailserver, specify the 
password.</Description>
         <Description Lang="de">Wenn Sie fr SendmailModule den Wert "SMTP" 
ausgewhlt haben und sich an Ihrem Mailserver anmelden mssen, geben Sie hier das 
Passwort fr die Authentifizierung an.</Description>
         <Group>Framework</Group>
         <SubGroup>Core::Sendmail</SubGroup>
Index: bin/otrs.checkModules
===================================================================
RCS file: /home/cvs/otrs/bin/otrs.checkModules,v
retrieving revision 1.25
diff -u -r1.25 otrs.checkModules
--- bin/otrs.checkModules       24 Jul 2008 15:57:50 -0000      1.25
+++ bin/otrs.checkModules       2 Feb 2009 13:04:16 -0000
@@ -124,7 +124,12 @@
             {
                 Module   => 'Authen::SASL',
                 Required => 0,
-                Comment  => 'for SMTP backend',
+                Comment  => 'for authentication to your SMTP server',
+            },
+            {
+                Module   => 'Net::SMTP::SSL',
+                Required => 0,
+                Comment  => 'for secure connections to your SMTP server',
             },
         ],
     },

Attachment: SecureSMTP.pm
Description: Perl program

Attachment: otrs.checkModules
Description: Binary data

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