E-mail messages sent to @Requests aren't being processed correctly. Either they come through as gobbledygook or they don't come through at all. What's going wrong?

Typically, users send out e-mail messages in plain text format or HTML (a way of representing more complicated display formats). However, @Requests is only capable of processing plain text messages. Messages sent in HTML format will look like gobbledygook if read into @Requests.

One way to ensure that e-mail requests are always sent in plain text format is to have users submit their requests through a web page. Click here for a sample web page that can be used for request submission (MainBoss support password required).

If you are managing your e-mail with Microsoft Exchange or Outlook, there's another approach that is mostly successful: for all messages sent to the @Requests mailbox, tell your mail server to convert them into plain text. To do this, you must have appropriate permissions to reconfigure the mail server. Then follow these steps for the @Requests mailbox:

1. In the console tree, navigate to Server Configuration > Client Access.
2. In the work pane, click the POP3 and IMAP4 tab.
3. Select POP3 and then, in the result pane, under POP3, click Properties.
4. On the POP3 Properties page, click the Retrieval Settings tab.
5. Under Message Retrieval, select the Text only format from the drop-down list under Message MIME format.
6. Click Apply, and then click OK to save your changes.

This tells Exchange/Outlook to convert HTML messages into plain text whenever @Requests obtains a message from the mailbox file. The process isn't perfect—in particular, it doesn't work if the e-mail message has attachments, and there are some other cases in which Exchange/Outlook makes mistakes. However, it will convert most HTML messages into the plain text that @Requests needs.

Note that MainBoss Advanced can handle HTML messages, as well as the IMAP4 protocols for e-mail message retrieval.