Automatically have emails go to a local folder 1

[itmasterw]

Hi, I am not sure if this can be done, but my company asked if I could do this. They are going to set up a folder in Lotus Notes to hold emails with request that come in to their department. They want me to develop something that will go through the emails and bring them into a folder (preferably as a text file) on my local machine.
I have no idea how to access an email in a folder, and we would not access to the server directly. However, some people feel that if I have Lotus Notes open on my computer, I should be able to do this.
We are runing on an NT Machine.
If any one can help I would appreciate it.

 

[pmonett]

Okay, it doesn't sound like you have a lot of Notes Designer experience, am I right ? Do you have the Designer client installed on your desktop ?

Anyway, lets get some things straight. You want to run a scheduled agent on a Notes mail server to export mail contents to a directory on a hard disk automatically, right ?
Well, the server cannot write data to anything outside of what it has direct access to. That means that, if the server is supposed to write data to a folder on your disk, that folder has to be shared and the physical server has to have it mapped to a drive letter.
This is a trivial exercise, but it does mean that you will have to have your PC on at all times (not a big deal either), else the agent will not be able to complete correctly.
The second part will be exporting the mail in a text format. Can be done, but there is no automatic feature for that. There may 3rd-party tools, but you'll probably have to pay for them if you do find one. You are almost certainly going to have to write this agent yourself. Even if you do find a ready-made script (on the sandbox or elsewhere), you'll have to adapt it to your specific conditions.

All this sounds like a lot of work for mail that is already available in a mailbox. Is there really a business case for this ? What treatment are these text files going to go through ? Can this not be more easily done in a Notes db directly ?

Pascal.

 

[itmasterw]

I am not saure to the last part, buit here is what they want me to do. In the email will be some informatio that they will want me to extrat. If this was in a text file this would be no problem. I could either create a VB program, or have it imoported into Access, parse it, and run queries to get the info I want. then generate a report for this. And yes it is a real business application. I can leave the lotus notes open, but they want my program to go through the inbox and extract the emals automaticly; not that they have to have someone do this manually. Any further ideas would be appreaciated.

 

[pmonett]

I would keep the VB for moving the exported text to a fileshare somewhere. The server can handle the export itself quite easily - for an experienced programmer that is.

I would suggest creating the export as an agent in the database. The agent should drop the text files in a folder on the server's local hard disk. Then you could use a VB app to take the files from the folder and drop them wherever on the network they need to be for additional processing.
Doing the extract locally would be a nuisance involving local replica, local agent scheduling and scheduled replication. Possible, but too accident-prone for my taste.

Does this conform to your needs ?

Pascal.

 

[itmasterw]

yes this sounds great, I am just not sure how I would create an Agent in an Access database to export this. And since I do not have access to the email server or the file path, I am not sure how the agent would do this. All I have to work with is that I will have the Lotus Notes window open, and that folder itself will not be open all the time.

 

[pmonett]

Access to the server is a requirement for this project.
If you cannot get it for yourself, ensure that you have the help of your Domino Administrator.
If you cannot control the various elements (server access to test the agent, network access to test the transfer app), then you will not be able to complete this project.

The Agent I propose cannot be created in Access. It must be done in the Notes db that is to export mail content.

Pascal.