[thelist] E-mails into database (again!)

[Burhan Khalid]

Kevin Stevens wrote:
> Since I last posted about this I have been looking into the suggestions 
> put forward. To re-cap, there is an e-mail list (similar to this one) 
> and I want to place all the e-mails into a searchable database on a web 
> site.
[ snip ]
> But it occurred to me yesterday that I have a server on my machine 
> already, IIS on XP Pro. So my question is, is it possible to write a 
> script that will run on IIS to connect with either an e-mail account or 
> search my hard drive for copies of the downloaded mails, and then put 
> the results into a database which I can manually upload once a week? I 
> realise this is probably not the best way to do this, but to my mind it 
> should work. If this is the case, can anyone point me in the right 
> direction as to how I might achieve this because I have no idea even 
> where to start looking.

Firstly, let me say that I am not a ASP guy, but this should work for 
you.  I'm giving you a reference from my MySQL/PHP experience, but its 
just a matter of replacing the software components with something else. 
  I'm not sure if a program exists that does this already, but it is 
very easy to write one, once you understand what needs to be done:

If you can setup your email listing software to forward all messages to 
the list to a particular email address, then this would work wonders 
(or, you are subscribed yourself). Let me see if I can explain this 
without tripping over my thoughts.

What you do is, you write a program that reads the remote email box 
every /x/ minutes and downloads all messages, then you write your 
queries that enter the information into a database.  This is easily done 
with PHP, and I'm sure similar libraries exist for ASP (or in your case, 
why not go with .NET?)

If you have a database server on your live box and you can get remote 
access to it, then its just a matter of connecting to it from your local 
PC, and your updates will be 'live' whenever your script runs.

If you are unfortunate and are dealing with only .mdb files, then you 
will have to write a new mdb file with the information, save, then 
upload it to the remote server (all this can be done from your script).

Finally, you setup Windows Scheduler to execute your script at an 
interval (and ensure your PC is online).  That should be all there is to it.

If language is not an issue, all this can easily be put together using 
PHP and MySQL (or any other database backend).

Sorry for the long reply, but hopefully this gives you some ideas,
Burhan