Receiving email using btnet_service.exe

One of the powerful features of BugTracker.NET is its ability to receive an email and treat it as a bug entry. Once it’s in the database, you can respond to the email from within BugTracker.NET and your response will be tracked. The apps that receive the emails are btnet_console.exe and btnet_service.exe. Btnet_console.exe and btnet_service.exe are POP3 clients that fetch email and stuff them in the database as bugs. You configure the email accounts on the project pages - you can use a different email account per project. You can also respond to emails from within btnet and the responses are saved.

Btnet_console.exe and btnet_service.exe do the same thing, but one is just a console app and the other is a service. Try running the console app first because it is verbose and will help you debug your configuration.

Both of them get their settings from the “btnet_service.exe.config” file.

Running btnet_console:

Enter “btnet_console.exe btnet_service.exe.config” when you are in btnet’s directory.

Running btnet_service.exe:

Use “installutil.exe” to install btnet_service.exe as a Windows service. Here’s the command I typed, all on one line:

c:WindowsMicrosoft.NETFrameworkv4.0.30319>installutil c:btnetbtnet_servicebinreleasebtnet_service.exe

And if it works, this the output I see:

Btnet_service.exe looks for btnet_service.exe.config in its own folder. (Older versions were hard-coded to look in the c:folder).

Read the comments in btnet_service.exe.config. Note that one service instance can support multiple websites.

The service communicates with the website via the page insert_bug.aspx. It cannot use windows security.

Fetch email without service

Instead of running btnet_service.exe and configuring it via btnet_service.exe.config, you can specify in Web.config that the ASP.NET application itself creates a worker thread that does the same thing. On the one hand, this new way is easier to setup and configure than btnet_service.exe. On the other hand, this new way won’t work if you are running BugTracker.NET on a shared host with ASP.NET “Medium Trust”, because “Medium Trust” won’t allow an ASP.NET to create an outgoing TCP/IP connection to the POP3 server. See the “Pop3…” settings in Web.config for more info.