Emailing attachments to a shared drive

[WithoutMotive]

Hi gang,

 

Just wondering if this was possible. Just an idea.

 

We have Exchange 2003 running on Windows Server 2003.

I was wondering if it was possible to set something up so that pupils can email an attachment to a certain email address and, instead of the mailbox being accessed by a user, the attachment to be saved to a specific folder to be accessed as a share instead.

 

If this isn't possible or too complicated, it doesn't matter.

 

Cheers

[powdarrmonkey]

You'll need a service that polls the mailbox from time to time, extracts attachments and saves them appropriately.

 

I don't know of anything off the shelf, so you'll probably be rolling your own. So you need to consider how often you'll poll, how you decide if an attachment is safe (the usual paranoia about untrusted input should apply), what you'll do with corrupt attachments, and what to do when file names clash, amongst other things.

 

powdarrmonkey, who today is a gang all in himself.

[srochford]

With Exchange server you can have an event sink - this is basically a script that runs when an event happens on the server.

 

The MS support page How to register a transport event sink for the SMTP Service in Exchange 2000 Server gives an example of how you can check messages as they arrive at the server - the action it takes is not what you want but it shows how to process an attachment. It shouldn't be too hard to make it put the attachment in a specific folder when the recipient address is the one you want.