We’re developing a SaaS application, which, among other things, has to have email integration: whenever a user sends an email to a unique email address (such as dropbox+af74c123@example.com), our .NET service has to handle this message – pretty common nowadays, I guess.
Before starting to design anything, I’d like to know what is the approach for dealing with this. We have, though, several requirements:
- Preferably, use only standard Windows Server 2008 (R2) components
- Each customer has to have a unique email address
- Provisioning of a new email address should be as painless as possible – preferably, email server should accept mail sent to any address and let the callback handle the rest
- Avoid polling as much as possible – the email server has to notify our service of new messages
I know it’s not a Server 2008 component, but you could avoiding polling if you use a custom server like this managed email server. Account management and handling are pretty straightforward. Free for commercial use and relaxed license. We have been using it for a year in production.