Creating automatic issues from e-mails in Redmine using PostfixAdmin

Almost every day I use Redmine as a task manager and a place where I can store my notes. Recently I was looking for a way of configuring Redmine to create issues from emails. There is an  official instruction on how to do that. However I have a different Postfix configuration, so I had to change some of described steps. First of all my virtual mailboxes configuration is stored in a MySQL database. I also use PostfixAdmin to easily manage mailboxes or aliases in different domains.
In this post I’ll show you how to fetching emails into Redmine, if you have a similar configuration.

There are 3 ways to receive an email in Redmine: standard input, IMAP/POP3, and forwarding via a mail transfer agent (Postfix, Sendmail etc.). I chose third option because is the fastest one. OK, let’s begin.

Set up an e-mail handler

1. Login into Redmine as an administrator, and go to Administration > Settings > Incoming emails, check Enable WS for incoming emails and generate a secret key e.g. qWeRTYUI34oadfgh3jkl
2. Save the API key in any file e.g. redmine-api.key
3. Add execute permission to a ruby script in your Redmine folder: extra/mail_handler/rdm-mailhandler.rb (Only if you have web and email server on the same machine as I do. Otherwise you have to copy this file to your email server)

   sudo chmod +x [redmine_dir]/extra/mail_handler/rdm-mailhandler.rb

4. Login into PostfixAdmin and go to Virtual List > Add Alias

   

5. Add new alias. PostfixAdmin validates ‘To’ filed, so you can’t type an address without @domain part:
   test-redmine: Invalid email address test-redmine, fails regexp check
   Therefore you can type any address and change it manually in the database.
6. Connect into your Postfix database. PostfixAdmin stores aliases in the ‘alias’ table.

   UPDATE alias SET goto = 'test-redmine' WHERE address = 'test-redmine@p0n3.net';

7. Add new alias to /etc/aliases file:

   test-redmine: "|/usr/bin/ruby /var/www/redmine.p0n3.net/extra/mail_handler/rdm-mailhandler.rb --url=https://redmine.p0n3.net --key-file /etc/postfix/redmine-api.key --unknown-user accept --no-permission-check --no-check-certificate -p sampleproject --tracker Feature --priority normal"

   Okay, this step needs some explanation.
   We told postfix to execute rdm-mailhandler.rb on incoming email to test-redmine alias.
   |text means that mail is piped into a command. I added double quotes, because commands that contain special characters (included whitespace) must be enclosed between them.
   Now let’s check script parameters:
   --url=https://redmine.p0n3.net URL of your Redmine server
   --unknown-user accept describes how to handle emails from an unknown user (accept means that new issue will has anonymous user as author)
   --no-permission-check disable permission checking when receiving email
   --no-check-certificate disable checking server certificate
   -p sampleproject name of your project in Redmine
   --tracker Feature name of the target tracker (Feature, Bug, etc.)
   --priority normal priority of created issue
   --key-file /etc/postfix/redmine-api.key full path to a file that contains your Redmine API key. I used this option instead of --key=[API key], because e.g. in case of error the key may appear in the mailer daemon message.

   

8. Create Postfix alias database (or you can use newaliases)

   sudo postalias /etc/aliases

9. Add mapping line to the /etc/postfix/transport file

   test-redmine@p0n3.net local:

10. Create Postfix lookup table

    sudo postmap /etc/postfix/transport

11. Add transport map to the /etc/postfix/main.cf file

    transport_maps = hash:/etc/postfix/transport

12. Restart postfix

    sudo systemctl restart postfix

That’s it. Now, to test the configuration you can send an email. I hope someone find this instruction useful 🙂

Problems

Debugging

If you have some problems with that configuration, I recommend you to add -v option to selected daemon definitions (e.g. smtpd and transport) in the /etc/postfix/master.cf e.g.

smtp      inet  n       -       -       -       -       smtpd -v

Now, after restarting postfix you should have more information in /var/log/maillog

execvp …/extra/mail_handler/rdm-mailhandler.rb: Permission denied

If you use a Red Hat based distribution like Centos, you might have to add permission to SELinux configuration.

Command output: /usr/bin/env: ruby_: No such file or directory

Postfix local daemon always reset the PATH environment variable to a system-dependent default path, so make sure you have /usr/local/bin/ruby in your alias command (see point 7).

Sources

• Redmine Receiving Emails – official instruction
• Postfix manual – aliases
• Postfix manual – local
• Postfix manual – postalias
• Postfix manual – debug options