Whats the best way to Programmatically Process New Email Messages and Store Attachments

Question

I have several clients/vendors that distribute reports to me via email. Some of these files are enormous, and need to be removed from email and saved on a file share for processing, as well as to control mailbox size.

Can anyone provide guidance on their recommended method of automatically downloading and saving attachments.

I am in a MS Windows Environment (Client & Server Computers). Emails are on an Microsoft Exchange 2003 Email Server.

Preferred use of Microsoft Technology for consistency across solutions (C#), however I am open to any suggestions, be it C#, VBScript, Perl, Java, Components I should purchase, etc..

Scenario Each Day [email protected] sends an email with the subject "Activity Report for YYYY-MM-DD" to me at [email protected]

Each Email has an attachment named "ActivityReport-YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MI-SS.xls" which I need to save on my filesystem at "C:\FilesFromBob\ActivityReport-YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MI-SS.xls"

Thanks in advance for any assistance.

Answer 1

Exchange 2003 provides a WebDav API which you can use to access emails, contacts etc.. from a user's account.

There's a few answers about accessing a user's Exchange inbox on SO already. I've previously used this approach for almost exactly the situation you outline, and once you work out the WebDav API model and the structure of the requests and responses, it's not too difficult to extract emails and their attachments.

There are other ways to interact with Exchange 2003 (outlined on SO here), but I've only tried the WebDav approach because it seemed the most reliable.