Develop Reference

Parsing emails and attachments

I have a requirement to parse email messages and upload the email into DB based on certain filters. I have experience writing outlook add-in and it is possible to do this in client side.
But here i think i need to write some plugin in exchange server and parse the email messages there itself. is my assumption right? if so please point me to some tutorial for writing exchange server plugins.

You could probably use my MimeKit library to parse the messages.

Check mailflow for Microsoft SMTP service

We have a SMTP Cluster (Microsoft SMTP Service) that we would like to check for mailflow every 5 minutes.
What we would like is to send a mail every 5 minutes through every node to a mailbox - check the mailbox for received mails and see how long it took.
We would like to use Powershell to do the sendmail function and we got that in place.
Our obstacle is how to read mails automatically? We have tested that we could use Gmail as receiving mailbox and can read mails through Powershell (Feeds / Atom) but that doesn't mark the mails as read in the mailbox.
We have own Hosted Exchange, maybe we could use that for receiving mail?
Any thoughts?
Best regards

If you have Exchange mailboxes available, you can script reading and manipulating email (including marking as Read) with Powershell using the EWS managed api:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd633710(v=EXCHG.80).aspx
Glen Scales has many good articles and code samples for using it on his blog:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd633710(v=EXCHG.80).aspx

Sending thousands of emails from a program?

A website that I used my password on was compromised and the monkeys in charge had stored everything in plaintext. The list was released publicly online. Needless to say, my password and email were among them.
I would like to send emails to everyone else who was listed (thousands) and inform them that to continue using their password is unsafe. My language of choice would be C# and I would be sending them from my gmail with the help of this code: Sending email in .NET through Gmail
I can pretty much assume gmail will lock me out before I finish 10 in under a minute. Apart from sending emails out intermittently, how can I do this?
edit: I agree with the responses. I should instead send one email. Is there a limit to the amount of recipients I send an email to from gmail?

If happy to spend a bit of money for a reliable solution, you could integrate (very easily) with http://sendgrid.com. Provides you with heaps of features to track delivery of email and reporting/analysis of email opening, clicking etc.
Gmail does have limitations on how many emails you can send per day, and I would not recommend for your usage.

Or use some online mail marketing tool like MailChimp http://www.mailchimp.com
This service can easily send thousands of e-mails without problems. They have a free service too. Where you can store up to 2,000 subscribers. Send up to 12,000 emails per month.
It even has a REST API available for interacting with it from a custom app.
However I don't know if you are legally allowed to sent e-mails to the addresses on the list. I know it's for a good cause, but please be warned that this sort of e-mails can be considered as spam.

Again, don't build it yourself, but use off-the-shelf specialized services: I suggest looking at
Amazon Simple Email Service (SES)
which is part of Amazon Web Services (cloud storage, computing and more).
Amazon SES lets you send bulk and transactional email to customers in a quick and cost-effective manner
Service highlights include:
Simple
Inexpensive
Reliable
Scalable

How to programatically get ALL (read and unread) messages from gmail, read status, etc?

I have a customer service web app requirement, which requires that I work pull & integrate data from Gmail, eBay, Amazon, and Paypal. My solution is going to be developed in ASP.Net 4 with C#.
The issue that I'm running into is that my client needs pretty much all of the information that Gmail has about each and every email that comes in & the ATOM feed coming from Gmail seems to be a bit lacking. I realize I can also use POP3 or IMAP, but they too are lacking for a number of reasons.
Specifically, the client needs the read status of emails (whether or not THEY have read emails that were sent to THEM). They also need for all of the filters to remain intact. So if an email is tagged with x,y, & z, then I need to know about it.
The ATOM feed only shows me unread emails, so that's out.
POP3 has no clue (and rightfully so) whether or not they've read an email or not (unless I pull it into a database and manage read status, myself...but that doesn't work if they actually read a mail from within gmail itself).
IMAP seems like it would give me everything I need, but I'm not 100% sure on that. What do you all think? Also, IMAP is SOOO slow. Is anyone aware of any decent libraries that are fairly fast. We're talking about a customer inbox with some 360,000'ish messages at the present time, & the client would prefer to keep those messages at gmail & not work with a disconnected database.
Thoughts / Opinions?

IMAP does provide read/not-read status for each message and you can pull from particular 'labels' (folders) or just pull from the 'all messages' bucket. You don't need to pull the entire message either, you can ask for headers only, giving you the ability to quickly scan many emails.
I've been working on a program to pull my entire gmail dataset down for my own tinkering and processing. I'm using linux, and while there are a multitude of imap 'mirror' and imap 'processing' applications out there, I just want to play with the data, being able to do what I want with it, without stuffing it back into an imap server locally. It's been working decently and I'm using the email's UID (modified slightly) as a file name to dump the headers & email data. Of course, you could massage the data and update a database or whatever at that point, I'm just stashing it for post-processing later. Looking for trends in my email, mostly tinkering.
I tried using the etpan libraries for IMAP processing, didn't find them to my liking, so I've been pulling imap routines from other email programs and servers to play with. I have the RFC's, but really really trying to not reinvent the wheel here if I can help it.
Yup, not the best answer, but hopefully some information to help. I imagine there are nice libraries for PHP, or other web-based systems, I've been working with C++/C myself.

EMAIL from web server

We have a website sending mail alerts to end users. The site has been developed in c# ASP.NET.
I want to find the best way to send the email alerts to my users. Making sure the mail is not trapped in any spam filters. I read on the internet it is best to sent the mail directly from the web server and not route via an SMTP mail service such as google apps or Postini.
Can anyone tell me if this is correct?

First of all
Making sure the mail is not trapped in
any spam filters
Is not possible - otherwise spammers would do this. You just have to make sure you're domain isn't associated with any spamming activities and watch for keywords within the email.
I read on the internet it is best to
sent the mail directly from the web
server and not route via an SMTP mail
service such as google apps or
Postini.
This point doesn't make sense - your e-mail will never be delivered if it doesn't get routed via an SMTP server, the average message will pass through multiple on its route to the recipient.

The answer is to not actually send email and let someone else deal with the problem. I'd look at postmark or Amazon's simple email service.

We had problems that mails sent with local server often get trapped in spam filters until we implemented SPF on our mail server.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sender_Policy_Framework
But I am not admin, that's just what our admin said, and after that we have no problems anymore.
btw. maybe would be better to ask on serverfault.com