Email Setup

The application needs an email service to be setup. This is required for a number of reasons.

• Send out Welcome emails - Whenever a new user is created, the system sends out an email to the email ID provided for that user. That email contains the user ID and a system generated password that the user can use as a temporary password which must be changed by the user after logging in for the first time.

• Send Password Rest emails - Whenever a password reset is done in the system, a password reset email is sent out.

• Send Settlement Notices - When a settlement is created, an email is sent out to all users who are part of the settlement. That email contains the Settlement and the Expense Reports as PDF attachments.

The application uses JavaMail. The app needs the details of your email provider and login details as shown below. You specify these properties in the src/main/resources/expense-tracker.properties file.

# Email Configuration
# The Email Server Host name (e.g. GMail) 
email.server.host=smtp.gmail.com
# The email server port (e.g. GMail)
email.server.port=587
# The account to be used for the email services. Use you own. The one shown here is dummy.
email.user.name=etrack.admin@gmail.com
email.user.password=*********
email.from.emailid=alerts@etrack.com
email.from.displayname=Expense Tracker Group
# ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you are running expense tracker behind a corporate firewall, you would need to take care of the proxy server details. Normally web traffic behind a corporate firewall would be routed through a proxy server. Depending on your corporate policies a userID/password may or may not be required at the proxy server. You normally supply these in the Internet Connections property page of your Windows Machine(in case running Windows). For a java app like Expense Tracker, you would need to supply this information as JVM startup properties. For example, if you are deploying to Tomcat, supply these properties in the JVM_OPTS variable of the catalina.bat script.

-Dhttp.proxySet=true -Dhttp.proxyHost=your_proxy_server_ip -Dhttp.proxyPort=your_proxy_server_port

Note that, the email provider you choose to use (example GMail) should be allowed to be accessed by your network. Your network might be blocking access to the GMail servers at the proxy server in which case, email setup will fail. Expense Tracker will run, but the emails won't be sent out.