My goal is to build a system where each user has an email address to which he can forward e-mails. From these emails the system should take: subject, date, recipient, text. This data should go into a database with a unique ID per mail and user.
Now I know this doesn't sound that complicated, but I am wondering which programming language to use. Also I wonder how to host the email, since there will be quite some email addresses and there should be some job running to detect when new emails are coming in.
Not very experienced at this so hoping that some of you could give me some tips to look into. I hope this question is not too general - I did my best to be specific. All input is very much appreciated.
Thanks,
Vincent
Essentially you need three components
A Mail Server (to receive the emails) Look at MS Exchange (Windows) or Postfix (Linux) as examples
Some code to parse the incoming emails, you could use almost anything to do this
A database, look at SQL Server, My SQL as examples
Your question is a bit broad to give more specific advice
Related
I would like to programmatically be able to access all the emails stored in an exchange server in order to do some text analysis on those emails. How would I go about this, assuming I had all the necessary permissions and direct access to the server?
My gut says you should use eDiscovery tools built into Exchange, but I'm not entirely sure that will accomplish what you want. eDiscovery does what it was designed to do pretty well, but that's entirely focused around finding emails in a date range or via keyword.
I'm working on a web service that would use an SMS gateway to receive instructions from customers. Since this would be a commercial product I would like to implement a safeguard to protect our system from SMS spoofs. I don't want people impersonating others by spoofing their number.
I've noticed that Twitter allows people to tweet through text messages, how can they make sure that messages are actually genuine?
Is this possible, and if so how do I accomplish this? Or should I ignore this and just deal with it through support should they get through.
How do users spoof their numbers? Every service I've seen that allows users to interact from their phone requires a validation process first (like this). And carriers won't let you send messages through their system from a device they don't know. SMS gateways also provide safeguards to prevent spoofing. So I'm not sure how big a problem this will be for you. I would worry about it once you start encountering it.
Unfortunately with services like Spoofcard it is sometimes possible for someone to spoof an sms message. Spoofcard even works in the US even though US carriers have historically been better at blocking spoofed text messages. You can try it yourself at their site. I was able to spoof a text message to/from a tmobile number.
The solution is to implement a verfication question/text for the user to answer but this will cost you/them an additional text message.
Fogmo, a popular SMS spoofing site, allow you to contact them and add any number to a 'blacklist'. This would ensure that your customers' phones won't be spoofed to, or from. It's well worth contacting them (and similar sites) to request this.
I need to write a script for MS Exchange Server 2003 that will analyze incoming emails and put some of them into a specific mailbox. Of course it's a lot of information about Exchange Server scripting at MSDN, but amount of information there is very huge. Is it some simple tutorials available that will describe how to install a simple script on MS Exchange Server that will analyze incoming emails?
I believe the only way to accomplish what you want in exchange 2003 is to write an smtp event sink. Here is an overview. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/csmanagedeventsinkshooks.aspx
Unfortunately, event sinks can be prone to have very poor performance characteristics and are generally discouraged. However, I believe that is the way to accomplish what you want to do.
If you decide to go down this path, here are a couple of references for you:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/894286 and
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms998610.aspx
Try these? (the first one is for exchange 07)
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/exchange/Exchange2007EWS-Part1.aspx
http://www.codeproject.com/KB/cs/Exchange_2003_with_WebDav.aspx
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I was brainstorming interesting usages of Twitter and came up with the following:
An application can use it as a call home mechanism
An application that has an invalid license could broadcast its location
A software company could use it as a remote shell like interface and issue commands to shutdown, restart and to publish patches
An application can use it for heartbeat purposes
Has anyone else came up with other non-standard usages of Twitter?
I fail to see the advantage of using a proprietary, third-party chat site in place of an appropriate networking protocol.
Matthew nailed the point that all these "applications" just represent a communications protocol between twitterer and remote host, and there are lots of mature protocols you could use instead right out of the box, rather than rolling your own on twitter.
But depending on your situation, of course there could be scenarios in which twitter is the easy way. I have written similar hacks that use e-mail as transport mechanism for automated tasks, simply because corporate red tape doesn't permit us other more conventional means. They can reboot machines, restart processes, post public messages, etc.
One of it is already available for Windows - "TweetMyPC v2.0 lets you shutdown/restart/LogOff and lots more in your windows PC.remotely."
I'm not sure this counts as a very practical use (a bit of fun mainly), but it certainly attracted my interest:
Twitter image encoding challenge
The idea of this challenge is to try to encode a picture into a 140 (Unicode) character Tweet. It's quite astounding how much information some of the algorithms posted there can fit into a message.
Scott Hanselman used Twitter to create an app for ordering a sandwich.
Check out his post
I think the main advantage of using twitter in instances like this is its SMS capabilities (and the fact they're free - whereas you can buy services that charge a monthly fee to allow you to receive SMS messages to a HTTP page or something like that).
I'd considered using it to make a little budget app for myself where I could SMS twitter things I'd bought to a private twitter account, similar for tracking petrol usage I was planning on smsing the odometer reading,cost etc in a certain format and capturing it at home to run statistics and stuff on it. There are limitations to it though - like you can only hook up an SMS number to 1 twitter account...
It's good to think outside the box, but don't be too focused on using just twitter because it's cool.
If you were comfortable setting up sensors and such, you could get a microcontroller, hook it up to a twitter feed, and then give it remote commands.
For instance, remote controlled house lights. You could then just tweet "Home lights on GXSDFXV" (The garbage at the end is to prevent real tweets from turning on and off your lights).
I wouldn't use Twitter in particular for transferring any private information (think about security if someone hacks the account and can shutdown your corporate servers or transfer fake licenses). For that I would setup a private server which implements the open microblogging protocol (like identi.ca) as long as - like others already said - there is another more suitable protocol.
For publishing PUBLIC information (heartbeat messages can be considered that, too) I like the idea pretty much. We recently had a very successfull (but unfortunately effectless) E-Petition in Germany where a Twitter account posted the number of signatures every couple of minutes.
Carsonified are using this to allow people to discover other people sitting in the same room at their conferences.
They label each chair with a tag and then you tweet that tag to an account they have and it registers you on a floorplan on the venue. Users are coloured in on the plan by their interests.
Clever but a bit overcomplicated for my tastes...
http://hello.carsonified.com/Home/Faq
Anyone know how to do this without using a third party program? If there no way to do it with a add-on someone can recommend one?
EDIT: I need to add this in the server so all users have the same signature.
Thanks
You need to create your own exchange message sink to do this. Here's a classic VB example from MS KB:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317327
and a VB Script one:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/317680
And lots of goodness from MSDN about Exchange 2003 Transport Event Sinks:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms526223(EXCHG.10).aspx
If you're running Exchange 2007 then you can use Transport Rules:
http://msexchangeteam.com/archive/2006/12/12/431879.aspx
http://www.msexchange.org/tutorials/Using-Transport-Rules-Creating-Disclaimers-Exchange-Server-2007.html
We used CodeTwo-s Exchange rules for a while on Exchange 2003.
However there is a known problem with it: if the messages stay in the queue for 2-3 minutes, the Exchange itself sends out the message without the footer. Most of the times it's not a problem, but we have something like 700 people in our organization. If there are a lot of emails and some of them contains attachments, then the virus scanner stops them for a while (MS Antigen).
Otherwise it's a perfect solution if you have a smaller group of users to manage.
From other point of view: our users like to have some kind of control over the signature. We generated them and put it to their Outlooks. They like it that they know and see that the signature is there and how it looks like.