Gmail account with evalink talos email integrations

Configuring Virtual Email Receiver or Email Integration with a Gmail Account

In this article, we are going to explain how to enable the Virtual Email Receiver or the Email Integration in evalink talos with a personal Google Account. This process requires a setup of an App Password in Google.

Google recently announced that from now on it will require 2-factor authentication for every user who needs to access their email. To bypass this problem, a user needs to use the Google Feature of 'App Passwords'.

PART A - Create a new App Password in your Google Account
To create a Google App Password, navigate to your Google Account at:

Select "Security".

Under "Signing in to Google", select App Passwords. You may need to sign in. If you don’t have this option, it might be because:
  1. 2-Step Verification is not set up for your account.
  2. 2-Step Verification is only set up for security keys.
  3. Your account is through work, school, or other organization.
  4. You turned on Advanced Protection.
At the bottom, choose "Select app" and choose: "Other (Custom name)".
Then, write 'evalink talos' for name  and click on "Generate".

The App Password is the 16-character code in the yellow bar on your device.

Tap "Done".


PART B - Enable the Virtual Email Receiver Integration in evalink talos with your Google Account
From your evalink talos dashboard, navigate to Company > Integrations.

Search for Virtual Email Receiver and click on: "Add Integration". You can follow the same steps to enable the Email Integration.

Enter:
  1. IMAP Host: imap.gmail.com
  2. IMAP Port: 993
  3. Username: <YOUR_GMAIL_ACCOUNT_USERNAME>
  4. Password: <APP_PASSWORD_GENERATED_ON_PART_A>

and finally, select the IMAP folder that should be monitored by evalink talos.

To finish the integration click on "Submit".

The state should now change to "Enabled". If not, you should double check the credentials you entered in the previous step.



Now, the next step is to enable and configure the Virtual Email Receiver on your site, so that you can allow the conversion of emails into alarms for a particular site.

To add the Virtual Email Receiver integration to a site, navigate to Sites > [YOUR-SITE] > Integrations, and then click on Email Receiver.

To enable the Virtual Email Receiver, click on the button: "Enable Virtual Email Receiver".

evalink talos provides a generated authentication token that you can use to filter your emails and avoid SPAM or email floods.

Alternatively a sender email address can be used to authenticate the incoming emails. In that case, only the provided email address is allowed to send email-alarms to evalink talos. If you want to use this option, you have to configure text mappings to react differently to each email-alarm depending on keywords within the subject or the body text of the incoming email.
For this tutorial, we will proceed with the first authorization option, which is easier to configure.

As a verification step, you can use the provided example body to send an email which will trigger an alarm in evalink talos. To do this, you need to ensure that at least the token and the alarm code are included in the email body. Additionally you can also enter the alarm zone and value, or geolocation coordinates and other custom headers.