I’m working on a project calling for full email server integration. We want to build a feature similar to what tripit.com does where you can email an itinerary to plans@tripit.com, and tripit knows the account context by the incoming mail message’s From attribute. Assuming it can match up the sender to an account in the database, they parse the message and add the iteration to that account. But what infrastructure is making that happen behind the scense?
I know there’s a 1001 send and fetch mail components available for free and paid, but does anyone know of a lower level service where the mail server can invoke my code at the time a message is received? I could solve the problem with poling, but scaling this up to a large user base and not loosing messages would get very tricky. I would love to buy this piece of my application.
Hopefully what I’m describing makes sense – anyone know of anything available? We’re building in .NET, but I would adjust my technology choices for the right service/component if it were available.
We use SendGrid for sending out transactional emails from our system (using SMTP integration) and they seem pretty good, they also have a Parse API that takes incoming emails, parses them and posts data to a url of your choosing. I’ve not used this feature myself but it may be what your looking for, http://docs.sendgrid.com/documentation/api/parse-api-2/
this is sadly only available with the $80/month package which is a shame because the other packages are much better value for money, but if that’s not an issue, it’s worth a look.
Hope this helps