There’s a new type of incoming email available for bank statement attachments, and emails membership attachments and reminder are not so likely to bounce. 

Incoming email refresher

For a while now, Cameo has been able to receive email that allows various messages and attachments to be added. This is an alternative to adding them manually, or using a scanner app attached to WebDav.

See the email addresses available in profile → incoming email. Where the email is routed to is indicated either by a variation of email address after a plus sign, or the same suffix on the subject line. For example
to reminder@to.cameo.example.com.

You can see the full list of suffixes in the help.

Bank statement attachments

This was an oversight. It should always have been possible to add bank statement attachments, which show up in Import Statements in Accounting Tasks as if they had been added there manually. It now is possible!

To do this, send to the address linked to your Cameo installation, with the “+statement” suffix or in the subject line. Like other incoming email, there are obvious variations so you don’t have to remember plural or singular etc: you can also use “+statements” or just “+s”.

For example
To: tocameo+s@example.com

Improved handling of emails that would otherwise be rejected

Messages intended as reminders (+reminder) should end up in Library – Reminder Messages. However, reminders are just plain text and don’t have files attached to them. So, previously, if the email contained attachments, these would just have been lost. This is typically a misunderstanding of what reminders are for. Nevertheless, it is unfortunate to just lose an attachment. Therefore, such attachments are now placed in the file store, and the reminder message contains a reference to them,

Also, a message sent to add attachment(s) to a member record (+attachment) would previously have been rejected (bounced) if a suitable membership record could not be identified. (There are several ways members can be identified: for example with #123 as the membership number in the subject, or a forwarded message from a member with their email address in the forwarded message). 

Instead, a failed member attachment email will now not be rejected, and instead the attachments are added to the file store and a reminder message added to say so. This means they can be sorted out manually later within Cameo, rather than dealing with an email bounce.

Other supporting changes

To make this all work smoothly, there are two more changes that are also generally useful:

  • convert a filestore file into another kind of attachment. Click more under the file name in file store and choose the appropriate option to attach to one or several membership records, or as a bank statement or deposit evidence attachment. Note that all of these copy the file, so the file store remains unchanged; you can, of course, then delete the file store copy if you want.
  • identify individual files in Cameo filestore URLs, as in, for example https://cameo.example.com/library/filestore/myfile.pdf . This filters for a file (or just possibly more than one) of that name.
  • though library reminder messages are just plain text, links in them are identified and are clickable. This is how files in the file store are linked to a reminder, but active links in reminders are also generally useful.

In addition, I will add shortly a means to convert a filestore file into a membership attachment, or various other file types. This isn’t there yet, but watch this space. (now done).

You can also do the reverse of copying to a membership attachment: in attachments in member tasks opening a membership attachment offers copy to file store.