AppSuite:OX Mail App

Revision as of 15:11, 17 January 2020 by Michael.koch (talk | contribs) (→‎Setup Dovecot Push)

OX Mail

The OX Mail is a companion app for OX App Suite, and brings the power of OX App Suite web-based email to your customers' mobile devices. The OX Mail is a native app designed specifically for Android and iOS smartphones and tablets.

With a focus on security and user-experience, OX Mail serves all your email needs on the go. Most notably you can answer and process mails even when you are offline, mails are synced when you go online. For completing addresses, OX Mail uses the address book of the device along with all received and sent mails. When you have deleted an email by accident, you can easily undo that. Furthermore OX Mail provides a list of known features such as pushing new emails onto your device, supporting mail folders, handling attachments, showing the number of unread email, and so on.

Key Benefits

  • Additional privacy and integration with OX Abuse Shield
  • Offline availability
  • Branding for customized design
  • Grouping notifications on Android
  • Mobile API facade to connect to OX App Suite

Open-Xchange now provides more detailed overviews and Feature Overview documents relating to new product releases. These can be found at https://www.open-xchange.com/portfolio/whats-new/

This app is brought to you by Open-Xchange. You can choose between using our OX-branded app as part of your OX App Suite license or to order a version that is adapted to your brand and published under your name.

Requirements

To use OX Mail you need to be running OX App Suite v7.8.4 or above together with the new Mobile API Facade. The Facade module provides an API optimized for mobile use-cases.

See OX System Requirements for details.

OX App Suite

OX App Suite is a modular platform designed for Telcos, Hosters, and other Service Providers and delivers a wide range of cloud-based services. These include email, file sharing, collaborative document editing, document management, time management, cloud storage and metrics for monitoring end-user behavior. More information can be found at https://www.open-xchange.com/portfolio/whats-new/

Mobile API Facade

The Mobile API Facade is a server component that brings the new native mobile mail apps together with the OX App Suite. We’ve built the facade based on the technology used and proven in the OX App Suite middleware. The facade is developed in Java, utilizing the OSGIFramework. Further information can be found at: http://oxpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=AppSuite:Mobile_API_Facade.

TLS 1.2

The communication between the OX Mail app and its end points needs to be secured with TLS 1.2. Please make sure that your infrastructure is capable of handling TLS 1.2 HTTP requests without downgrading the connection.

Pricing, Availability and Branding

OX Mail Availability

Users will be able to download their respective client for their device from the corresponding app store free of charge. The availability of the various clients depends on the approval process of the store provider. Clients for iOS and Android will be made available from the App Store and Google Play. The availability of the various clients will be confirmed by Open-Xchange via the usual communication channels.

Please message oxmailapp@open-xchange.com, or contact Open-Xchange Sales, for more information and pricing details about OX Mail.

Branding for Partners and Customers

With OX Mail it is possible for customers and partners to request the addition, and change, of a variety of branding elements in the app. This includes changing colors, graphical assets and icons.

For more information about branding, the cost of this service and what can be done please message oxmailapp@open-xchange.com, or contact Open-Xchange Sales.

Auto Discovery Service

The OX Mail app uses a central Auto Discovery Service to help new users to onboard to the app more easily.

Prerequisits

Every provider that fulfills the following requirements may be added to the service to give their end users a better onboarding experience.

  • The OX App Suite v7.8.4 or higher
  • The OX Mobile Facade v1.0.9 or higher.
  • A working push configuration.
  • One or more MX records on the domains of all supported email addresses.

Required Information

The provider has to submit the following information:

  • The MX-record that the used email domains will use.
  • The URL to the OX App Suite. The URL has to be publicly reachable.
  • A test account to successfully log into the app.
  • An associated test email address. The domain of the test email address should use the same domain mapping to the MX records as the regular email addresses.

Please send the required information to your Open-Xchange sales representative or oxmailapp@open-xchange.com.

Download & Installation

Installation of the Clients

The OX Mail is available via the different App Stores for iOS and Android:

OX Mail App is also available inside the OX App Suite user interface via the Client onboarding wizard. Further information can be found at: http://oxpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=AppSuite:Client_Onboarding

Installation of Mobile API Facade

Installation Guide and configuration options can be found under: http://oxpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=AppSuite:Mobile_API_Facade

Download & Installation of Packages

OX Mail is available with the following backend packages:

  • open-xchange-mobile-api-facade-push-certificates

To find the correct version of the package to be installed, please refer to http://oxpedia.org/wiki/index.php?title=AppSuite:Mobile_API_Facade#Version_Matrix

Installation on the server varies depending on the underlying distribution, details are available in the following chapters.

Redhat Enterprise Linux 6 or CentOS 6

Add the following repositories to your Open-Xchange yum configuration: 

 [open-xchange-mobile-api-facade-restricted]
name=Open-Xchange-mobile-api-facade-restricted
baseurl=https://CUSTOMERID:PASSWORD@software.open-xchange.com/products/mobile-api-facade/VERSION/mobile-api-facade-restricted/RHEL6/
gpgkey=https://software.open-xchange.com/oxbuildkey.pub
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
metadata_expire=0m

and run 

$ yum install open-xchange-mobile-api-facade-push-certificates

Redhat Enterprise Linux 7 or CentOS 7

Add the following repositories to your Open-Xchange yum configuration: 

 [open-xchange-mobile-api-facade-restricted]
name=Open-Xchange-mobile-api-facade-restricted
baseurl=https://CUSTOMERID:PASSWORD@software.open-xchange.com/products/mobile-api-facade/VERSION/mobile-api-facade-restricted/RHEL7/
gpgkey=https://software.open-xchange.com/oxbuildkey.pub
enabled=1
gpgcheck=1
metadata_expire=0m

and run 

$ yum install open-xchange-mobile-api-facade-push-certificates

Debian GNU/Linux 8.0 (Jessie)

Add the following repositories to your Open-Xchange apt configuration: 

deb https://CUSTOMERID:PASSWORD@software.open-xchange.com/products/mobile-api-facade/VERSION/mobile-api-facade-restricted/DebianJessie /

and run 

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install open-xchange-mobile-api-facade-push-certificates

Debian GNU/Linux 9.0 (Stretch; valid from v7.10)

Add the following repositories to your Open-Xchange apt configuration: 

deb https://CUSTOMERID:PASSWORD@software.open-xchange.com/products/mobile-api-facade/VERSION/mobile-api-facade-restricted/DebianStretch /

and run 

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install open-xchange-mobile-api-facade-push-certificates

Debian GNU/Linux 10.0 (Buster; valid from v7.10.3)

Add the following repositories to your Open-Xchange apt configuration: 

deb https://CUSTOMERID:PASSWORD@software.open-xchange.com/products/mobile-api-facade/VERSION/mobile-api-facade-restricted/DebianBuster /

and run 

$ apt-get update
$ apt-get install open-xchange-mobile-api-facade-push-certificates

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 12

Add the following repositories to your Open-Xchange apt configuration: 

$ zypper ar https://CUSTOMERID:PASSWORD@software.open-xchange.com/products/mobile-api-facade/VERSION/mobile-api-facade-restricted/SLE_12 mobile-api-facade-restricted

and run 

$ zypper ref
$ zypper install open-xchange-mobile-api-facade-push-certificates

Univention Corporate Server

If you have purchased the OX App Suite for UCS, the OX Mail App support is part of the offering. For installation of the OX Mail App push functionality please refer to the following steps:

  • Please make sure that the OX Customer Id has been entered in the UMC module "OX License Management" (Category "System").
  • Open the UMC module "Repository Settings" (Category "Software"), activate the checkbox "mobileapirestricted200" resp. (depends on the installed OX version) and click on "Install".
  • The module shows a confirmation dialog that shows which packages will be installed if the installation of the push packages for OX Mail App is continued.
  • After installation open the UMC module "Domain Join" (Category "Domain") and execute all pending join scripts to complete installation.

Screenshot mobileapriestricted UCS.png

Setup and Configuration

Setup Middleware Notifications

Please find the up-to-date version of this section here

Push Setup

The push setup requires a working OX App Suite and the Mobile API Facade.

Simply said the main purpose of the Mobile Push functionality is to register an OSGi event handler converting an incoming OSGi event with topic "com/openexchange/push" to an appropriate native push reaching the mobile device using either APN or GCM.

Setup Dovecot Push

Please find the up-to-date version of that section here

Setup App Notifications

Please find the up-to-date version of this section here

Known Limitations

Flagging

Starting with version v7.8.4 the OX App Suite supports flagging modes described here: https://documentation.open-xchange.com/7.8.4/middleware/components/mail_flagging.html. There are four different modes defined. These modes describe the handling of the IMAP FLAGGED flag and color flagging and how both work together. The OX Mail support only two modes, "Flagged only" and "Flagged implicit". All users using the OX Mail should be provisioned with one of these modes. The other two modes, "Color only" and "Flagged and color" are not supported currently and might cause bad user experience when the app is used in conjunction with other mail user agents.

Settings

The settings from the OX App Suite are not used by the OX Mail app. This includes the signature so that it has to be maintained manually both in the OX App Suite and the OX Mail app. Settings are also only available locally and not synced when using the app on multiple devices.

Threading

The used backend should support RFC 5256 in order for the app to show threads correctly. Dovecot is supporting this RFC out of the box. If the backend doesn't support RCF 5256 its possible to disable to disable threading support in the Mobile API Facade by configuring the following property in facade.properties: 

com.openexchange.mobile.api.facade.threading=disabled
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