Automated Emails and Replies

[Guest]

I have a .NET application that is used to approve certain business processes
within the company. A request is made on an ASP.NET page and the page sends
an email to the appropriate approver.

Currently, the approver must click on a link (provided in the email) to be
taken to an approval page where he can approve/reject the request. The
ASP.NET page then writes the approval to the database. This does not work
well from blackberrys etc. because the manager is not on the intranet.

Does anyone know of a way where the manager could just reply to the email,
with approve or reject in the body/subject of the email and have that make
make the changes in the database. This may be an Exchange question more so
than a .NET one. It seems like it should be possible as many SPAM mails
allow you to type unsubscribe to be automatically removed from the mailing
list. Any ideas?

 

[Ranjan]

I suggest you guys expose the webpage, with a Login page. There may be lots
of problems doing the same thing with mail servers.Also, you can also ask
this question on the appropriate exchange list.
Ranjan

 

[Guest]

Off topic but, you know those links in spams don't actually unsubscribe you,
right? Why don't you assign a guid to every request and then send a link to
the manager to click where they don't have to log in. Guid are unique enough
that no one will ever guess them. The link would point to a page like
approverequest.aspx?requestnum=FB0C0D22-A57F-4bb3-8158-7D2DEA24AAD4

This way no one has to login.

 

[Guest]

Bad example, I know that SPAM emails don't actually 'unsubscribe' you. I was
just trying to get across an idea of the funcationality I was seeking. I'm
know that management will not want to open the approval pages ouside of the
intranet, so maybe the desired funcationality is not possible.

The solution we have now is that managers can just forward the request to
thier assistant's who we have given approval access to (as they do not carry
blackberrys). We were just looking for somthing that left a better audit
trail then having an assitant do the approval.

 

[Guest]

You will have to go to an exchange group if you want to make this run on the
server but you can make a client application that will use the outlook
interop and check for incoming emails and then perform an action if it finds
one. I wrote a program to do something similar and it only took a couple of
hours to figure out what I needed to do.

 

[MWells]

s, I favor making your approval page public; it's more immediate and you can
have an interchange with the user if need be (e.g. enter your pin, or
process a multi-part approval).

If you want to pursue the email-reply approach, take a look at
www.advancedintellect.com; they have a number of excellent email components,
including a POP component that retrieves mail, and a MIME component that
allows you to dissect and parse your email messages thoroughly.

http://www.advancedintellect.com/product.aspx?pop3
http://www.advancedintellect.com/product.aspx?mime