Smtp server to handle incomming mails and create a PDF

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Hello everyone,

I work for a company in Belgium as the systems and network administrator.
A couple of years ago we've replaced our archiving software by some rubbish program that didn’t do what it was supposed to do.
After struggling with troubleshooting the application, I wrote a custom program to read the barcodes on the scanned documents and save the data to a MySQL database.
Long story short: link the order numbers to the correct documents based on the barcode.

As there is A LOT of mailing going on with the customer and internal departments, we’d like to archive mails in the same manner.
Now I was thinking of modifying our Exchange Online setup and adding a custom connector.
All mails that are being sent to DOESNTMATTER@archive.COMPANYNAME.com should be sent to a custom SMTP server (which runs on one of our servers).
This application then checks if DOESNTMATTER is an actual order number in our system.
If so ==> Convert the mail to a PDF (and also it’s attachments) and save the documents + write the document name and order number into the MySQL database.
If not ==> park the mail in some folder, where I can then manually control and correct.

Do you guys think this could be achieved with a c-sharp application?
My biggest struggle is the actual SMTP server. Creating the Exchange connector and handling the actual mails that are coming isn’t a problem.

Thanks for your reply!

What I have tried:

Nothing much really, been looking to find similar projects to help me on my way, but nobody seems to have the same needs :-(

Posted 25-Oct-21 7:54am

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[no name] 25-Oct-21 15:16pm

If you dump the incoming emails to disk, then you can use a C# program with a "FileSystemWatcher" to pick up (and convert) the new mail.

https://github.com/snsttr/smtp-dump

DerekT-P 28-Oct-21 7:47am

I've not done this by writing a custom SMTP server; however, I do have a similar process in production now. Mails are sent to a predefined (single) mailbox, with (in my case) a vehicle registration number as the subject line. I have a periodic (every 15 minutes) process that reads all mail in that mailbox (I use the MailKit component from .Net Foundation), parse it (using MimeKit), fetch corresponding data from the d/b (based on the subject line) and then do stuff with the mail content. (If it's HTML format, you could use something like Pechkin to save it as a PDF).
In your scenario I guess you need to keep the original subject line, but as you have a whole subdomain for this, you can setup a "catchall" email account and include your reference as the mailbox name as you suggest. In my case I've just got a standard hosted domain and have added an IMAP mailbox for the purpose. In fact as the whole shooting match is on a cheap hosted webserver, the periodic process is actually just a webpage that gets invoked via Plesk's scheduled tasks feature (or I could use an external Cron job to trigger it). It's run for 6months+ now without issue.

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Smtp server to handle incomming mails and create a PDF

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