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90

answers:

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Hello all,

we are using an an outlook macro for incoming emails to unzip the attachments, log them in sql server and copy them to a special working folder where a windows service processes them.

The problems are:

  1. the user must be logged in at the server otherwise the macro wont run. I think there is no workaround for this.

  2. whenever a modal dialog pops up in outlook and waits for user input, the macro wont execute either (f.e. AutoArchive) I have stopped AutoArchiving all x-days in the options. Because its a productive environment, are there other possible windows preventing the macro to execute, which i must disable now?

  3. Our outlook-macro solution surely is not the best because of above problems. Are there better alternatives to read emails, unzip attachments and move them to a working folder? My language is VB.Net and server OS is windows 2008.

Background Infos: Every night a scheduled task triggers a vb.net application. This app orders from an external website a huge amount of data (claims for the last 1,5 years from a big mobile manufacturer). This data is stored in many csv-files partially packed in zip-files. They are sent to us per 200-300 emails + attachments. The Outlook Macro is filtering the incoming mails from the imap server, saves the attachments to a working folder on the local system and saves the filenames/paths in the database(sql server 2005). Also it detects from email subject if the ssas cube must be reprocessed and saves this information in sql server. A windows service looks into the database if new files must be unpacked and processed(importing the csv-files into the database) or the ssas cube must be rebuilded.

Regards, Tim

A: 

It's not generally a good idea to have user logged in at the server. Why are you using outlook macro for this at the first place? Somebody can surely slap together an application that would poll POP/IMAP server and copy them to that special working folder. This could run as a scheduled task or a windows service.

Axarydax
Thank you for your post.I have added some additional background infos to explain the purpose of the macro. I hope there is a better way to accomplish this. How to read emails from VB.Net without Outlook would be the question i think.
Tim Schmelter