Question

Is it possible to update an entry in Lotus Notes via email just like posterous? If it is possible, how can i do that? Thanks.

Answer 1

Quite easy.

What you need to do is create an agent in the mail database which will process the incoming mail (this will require Domino Designer and the appropriate privileges in the mail DB).

Depending on your requirements, you can trigger the agent periodically (e.g., once an hour) or on a specific event (e.g., when new mail arrives).

All the agents I’ve ever written are in LotusScript (sort of VBA) and they can scan documents in the database, examining the status, headers and so on, to decide what to do.

One recent one I wrote for someone here follows. When called, it basically runs through the InBox checking each document for a subject heading containing ‘qwertyuiop’, and creates a response email back to the sender containing the same subject with ‘SUCCESS’ appended.

Then it moves the document from the InBox to the junk folder. This particular agent ran every 60 minutes since immediate response was not required. You should be able to pick up the intent from the code.

Sub Initialize     Dim s As New notessession     Dim db As notesdatabase     Dim view As NotesView     Dim doc As NotesDocument     Dim olddoc As NotesDocument     Dim subj As String     Dim newdoc As NotesDocument      Set db = s.CurrentDatabase     Set view = db.GetView('($InBox)')     If Not view Is Nothing Then         Set doc = view.GetFirstDocument         While Not doc Is Nothing             Set olddoc = doc             Set doc = view.GetNextDocument(doc)             subj = olddoc.GetFirstItem('subject').Text             If Instr(subj, 'qwertyuiop') > 0 Then                 Set newdoc = New NotesDocument(db)                 newdoc.SendTo = olddoc.GetFirstItem('inetfrom').Text                 newdoc.subject = subj & ' SUCCESS'                 newdoc.form = 'Memo'                 Call newdoc.send(True,True)                 Call olddoc.RemoveFromFolder( '($InBox)')                 Call olddoc.PutInFolder( 'junk')             End If         Wend     End If End Sub 

What you probably need is a slight modification to this which will open up a different database and change documents in there based on the mail documents.

All you really need is a key in the email that can identify which document in the secondary database should be changed, and some logic that can apply the changes based on the mail content.

That’s left as an exercise for the reader. What I’ve given you should be enough to get started (ask another question when you’ve had a play with this).