How to read client's email box...

[JCruz063]

Hello all...

My company has an ASP.NET website, and we want to provide an email-parsing system for our clients. With the system, our clients would go to our website, login, and send us a list of emails (which they receive from their clients). Server code would then parse the emails and store them on our database. Then, our clients can view and print reports based on the parsed data.

That's the general idea.

Now, we expect our clients to use Microsoft Outlook to receive emails from their clients. We need a way for our clients to send us those emails so that we can parse them and provide reports. That's my question... How can I read the client's outlook inbox, and send selected messages to our server through our website?

The desired scenario is as follows: our clients would go to our website, login, and click on a button that says something like "send email". At that point, a little program would run on the client side and will

(a) read the Outlook's inbox,
(b) allow the user to pick which emails are to be sent to us,
(c) convert the selected emails to a format that could be read by our server, and
(d) send the converted emails to our server, where server code will parse and store the data.

How would I go about accomplishing that using ASP.NET 2.0 (or 3.0/3.5) and C#? Or, should I use a different approach?

Thanks.

_________________________________
I think, therefore I am. [Rene Descartes]

 

[ca8msm]

You can't do this due to one fundamental issue - ASP.NET stands for Active Server Pages .NET. So, as this is a server-side language, you cannot read any data on the client.

I'd suggest either allowing the client to upload individual messages to you and then storing the content, or look at something like an ActiveX component which would allow you to interact with the client.


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Mark,
[URL unfurl="true"]http://aspnetlibrary.com[/url]
[URL unfurl="true"]http://mdssolutions.co.uk[/url] - Delivering professional ASP.NET solutions
[URL unfurl="true"]http://weblogs.asp.net/marksmith[/url]

 

[JCruz063]

Thanks ca8msm...

lol hehe - hmm sorry for not explaining myself correctly.

At that point, a little program would run on the client side...

On the quote above, I was referring to a client-side technology, mainly ActiveX (and less likely java applets). I would like to know how to access the inbox on the client side (assuming a client-side techonology would be used). I said "through our website", because the user would have to login to our website, and download/install the activex on demand (as is the case with every site that uses ActiveX controls).

At the moment, the programmer in charge of the project (as I'm not the one working on this) said CDO is giving him issues.

Thanks.



_________________________________
I think, therefore I am. [Rene Descartes]

 

[ca8msm]

I'm not sure how you would do it in ActiveX. Try asking here forum194


-------------------------------------------------------

Mark,
[URL unfurl="true"]http://aspnetlibrary.com[/url]
[URL unfurl="true"]http://mdssolutions.co.uk[/url] - Delivering professional ASP.NET solutions
[URL unfurl="true"]http://weblogs.asp.net/marksmith[/url]

 

[JCruz063]

Thanks.

_________________________________
I think, therefore I am. [Rene Descartes]