Process Inbound Emails Failed: No mail protocol

Question

I'm unable to pull activities from an email account. I'm using civicrm 4.5.5 and Wordpress. When looking at the job log I get

0
Summary
Finished execution of Process Inbound Emails with result: Failure, Error message: Process Activities failed
Details

Parameters parsed (and passed to API method): 
a:1:{s:7:"version";i:3;}

Full message: 
Finished execution of Process Inbound Emails with result: Failure, Error message: Process Activities failed

Referencing Process Inbound Emails Failed I looked at the civicrm error log and got the following error.

Oct 10 10:54:38  [info] $Fatal Error Details = Array
(
    [message] => Could not connect to MailStore for @<p>Error message: <pre>Empty mail protocol</pre><p>
    [code] =>
)

So it seems like Civi isn't even the information I put in the CiviMail settings. Unlike the question referenced, my problem does not seem to be authentication based. I have an account set up for Email-to-Activity but it doesn't seem to be recognized. Any ideas?

Answer 1

At Administer > CiviMail > Mail Accounts (civicrm/admin/mailSettings) you want to see two accounts configured, one for Bounce processing and one for Activity processing

It's possible what you're describing is what happens when there is no account configured for activity processing. If so, the error message is a bit misleading, but I suspect that's what you're seeing. If not, continue :)

Both of these mail accounts require working credentials, see "checking credentials" below.

As well as the username / password correctly set, those mail accounts require a protocol - this is probably IMAP, and probably with SSL. (If your mail provider doesn't use SSL, that's bad IMO.)

Checking credentials

Check the mail logins you have work ASAP. You can see the saved password in the DB or by viewing source when editing the account.

I use fetchmail to verify this from the server, so I can check access works from the server in question as well. For a Gmail account [email protected], this looks like:

fetchmail --ssl --check -u [email protected] -p imap imap.gmail.com

You can also check by adding a mail account to your desktop mail client, just remove it afterwards.