[kwlug-disc] General Thunderbird development ?

[Chris Irwin]

On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 10:54, Insurance Squared Inc.
<gcooke at insurancesquared.com> wrote:
> It seems I need to develop a CRM type database for my niche as
> everything I'm finding just doesn't work well enough.  The CRM is
> basically a client administration database, server hosted and accessed
> through a browser.  Our leads are inserted into the system then it
> manages them through to sales and afterwards.  It'll be developed in
> php/mysql.
>
> It's all standard database stuff, with one exception.  I'd like to
> integrate thunderbird into the system.  But I'm not sure if that can
> easily be done, and if so, what functionality is possible.  Part of the
> confusion is that thunderbird is local, and the CRM is hosted on an
> inhouse server.
>
> But ideally, I'd like to be able to somehow use thunderbird for emails,
> while still tagging emails to the client records of the CRM.  For
> example if I pull up client A, it'd be nice to view all the emails that
> went back and forth with that client, even if I'm not at the machine
> that sent and received the emails.
>
> Does anyone have any thoughts on such an integration?  I know it's a bit
> of a vague problem, but I'm not 100% certain exactly how much
> integration is actually feasible.

If you handle the mail server, couldn't you just copy mail that
matches specific addresses (It is a CRM, after all) be copied to a
maildir? Then share that out using IMAP as read-only? You could do
sub-maildirs based on client if neccessary (to avoid searching for
client-relavant mail).

This might not integrate with your web-based CRM, but is probably how
I would give this functionality.

-- 
Chris Irwin
<chris at chrisirwin.ca>