On our current vfire core 9.10.2, to allow External supplier contacts to email in and out of the system, the "User" tick box on their account has to be ticked as well.  If not, then when the external supplier contact emails back into a call, the email is not processed \ error appears in the system activity log.  Interestingly, if the external contact emails in a second time, somehow the system automatically ticks the user box on their account (possibly triggered by the 1st email failing) and then the email comes through fine and hits the call fine.

This is strange behaviour as you would believe an external contact is neither a user nor an analyst and thus an entity in its own right.  Most of our external contacts would not need \ use logins for vfire portal so I am not sure why they need to be classed as users to allow this to work in general.

Would it not be better to either just allow the external contact to send and receive email, or if the user box does have to be ticked, auto tick it when the external contact is setup for the first time \ warn the person creating it that this has to happen.