Server Upload by Email (Email API)

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    Adam Bishop

    Hi John,

    I've been itching to develop this for a while, though yours is our first request. Thanks!

    There are lots of SchemeServe areas for which this would be useful, not least for emails sent to Agents/Clients outside SchemeServe, so I'm interested to discuss what everyone would like to see for this feature.

    The technical question for me is how to determine automatically from the email where to attach it and for which User.  I had imagined we'd supply a special email address for each User which they could see when they visited the My Profile section.  I suppose we could instead supply several addresses for different tasks, e.g.:

    • username.claims@myurl.schemeserve.com
    • username.clients@myurl.schemeserve.com
    • username.agents@myurl.schemeserve.com
    • ...attaching to whichever ID we find in the subject line?
    Or perhaps better, along the lines of your suggestion we could create a full email-based API, such as:
    • username.claimFile.123.visible@myurl.schemeserve.com
    • username.clientNote.45@myurl.schemeserve.com
    • username.agentNote.678.visible@myurl.schemeserve.com
    • username.caseDocument.901.visible.sendon@myurl.schemeserve.com
    I'm in favour of bouncing back any emails that we can't decipher.  The moment we start talking about a holding area for emails that are then categorised by the user I'd switch off I think!  :)

    Best wishes,

     

    Adam

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    John Levett

    Agreed - any undeliverables should bounce back as this would highlight most errors straight away.

    The key would be to keep syntax relatively simple.You dont want strings that are too complex as there is likley to be an element of manual intervention for most of these uploads. The less a user has to do the better.

    You may have an issue that many people set their username as an email address... You may need rights management for which username is acceptable? Don't forget you will get a "from" email from the headers so that could potentially be your audit trail?

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    Adam Bishop

    Yes let's use the from EmailAddress in the mail headers to find the User account at the given URL with the matching email address.  If more than one are found we'll email back an error message.

    When sending, I'm in favour of keeping everything out of the target email address that we can.  Perhaps in some cases (emails received from Clients/Agents) we could scan the email for the original Client/Agent email address and only if we get a match, attach to the matching Client/Agent.

    With claims and cases, we could check the subject line and only attach if we can match the ID in the subject line.  Additional parameters could also be specific there, such as MakeVisible and maybe even SendOnwards. 

    Would be much simpler:

    1. clients@myurl.schemeserve.com (Scan email for User and Client details)
    2. agents@myurl.schemeserve.com (Scan email for User and Agent details)
    3. claims@myurl.schemeserve.com (ClaimID in subject line (not CaseId?); Scan email for User details)
    4. documents@myurl.schemeserve.com (CaseID in subject line and any parametersScan email for User details)
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