Software to download emails to shared network drive

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raytaylor

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#143706 24-Apr-2014 09:54

Hi All

Does anyone know of any software that can check a pop3 mailbox every ~5 minutes and download any messages to a folder on the hard drive in eml format or whatever outlook uses?

Rather than going through outlook or a PST file.

Am trying to set this up for a towing company - when they pick up a car that the police are impounding, I want them to create a new email, attach some photos, put the licence plate as the subject and email it to the office server, which dumps them into a folder on the network drive for future reference when the angry customer calls up and says
"your tow truck driver smashed my bumper with a sledge hammer"

We could do this through their cloud email system or imap - but each user has a local cache and it would waste a huge amount of space over time.

Ray Taylor

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davidcole

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#1030419 24-Apr-2014 10:01

I use gmvault - which does exactly what you're after, but from gmail only. I'm not sure if it can be set up with any pop3 server.

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timmmay

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#1030421 24-Apr-2014 10:05

You could also use something like evernote with a shared account.

Dynamic

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#1030422 24-Apr-2014 10:06

One of my guys put together a script to extract attachments from an Exchange mailbox if there happens to be an Exchange backend.

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timmmay

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#1030427 24-Apr-2014 10:13

You could also just leave it on am IMAP server, which is searchable. It would be a half day to write a little Java/.Net application that does it, have it run every 5 minutes via windows scheduler.

Something like "everything" (a filename based search engine) may come in hand for finding files/folders.

raytaylor

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#1030451 24-Apr-2014 10:45

Thanks guys - I did some more googling.
Was skipping over pages that showed code thinking it was for running on a webserver.

Anyhow this is the solution I found -

On the dispatch operators outlook, open the vb editor and paste the code

Sub CustomPhotoSave(Item As Outlook.MailItem)
MsgBox "Mail message arrived: " & Item.Subject
Item.SaveAs "X:\Photos\FromTablet\" & Item.Subject & "_" & Format(Now, "YYYYMMDDHHMM") & ".msg", OlSaveAsType.olMSG
End Sub

Then create a new rule for any incoming messages addressed to "photos@company" with the action 'run a script' and then select CustomPhotoSave from the dropdown list.

Any incoming messages that match the rule will get saved as an outlook .msg file on the shared company drive for anyone to look up later.

It was real simple when I realised how to get the vb editor to come up and that you dont save anything in the editor - its live, and the dropdown list from the run script field scans the vb editor code live so you dont need to link it in anyway other than select it from the script list.

Ray Taylor

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TwoSeven

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#1030534 24-Apr-2014 12:17

Typically you would do this in exchange and save the output to either a public folder or an archive folder. Both will allow you to index for search purposes.

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raytaylor

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#1030766 24-Apr-2014 18:41

TwoSeven: Typically you would do this in exchange and save the output to either a public folder or an archive folder. Both will allow you to index for search purposes.

Yeah... no exchange unfortunately.
The email server is offsite in a data centre. We have the public folder capability but the way the kerio software works is that each user keeps a local cache of the mailbox - its too slow and crashy if they dont, and the folder is expected to reach about 10gb a year if they do 6 jobs a day and there are 5mb of photos per job.
So that would mean each user keeps a cache of the public folder in their profile on the terminal server, which means 100gb of wasted space after a year on just keeping multiple copies of it.

But its working real well in their testing this afternoon. Any staff member can just go to the shared folder, search for the license plate number (email subject) and it comes up as the .eml filename+date. They double click on the file and outlook opens it which they can hit forward and send it to the police or an insurance company with just a couple of clicks.

Also using the signature setting on the samsung tablet to give them a basic form with some questions they would fill in like any notes, conditions of the car and other stuff (auto/manual) (fwd/rwd/4wd) that the dispatch operator needs to input into spreadsheets and forms when they are doing work for insurance companies.

Ray Taylor

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