Is there a way to process emails with DataMiner and what is the best setup?
There is a ‘Generic Mail Sender’ driver, is there also a ‘Generic Mail Receiver’?
The problem is that incoming mails can have different formats, making it harder to process the content if you want to actually do something with it.
There have been drivers developed in the past that make connection via POP3 to fetch mails, process the content, and based on the content fill in parameters. So it is possible to do this, but the content needs to have a fixed format. I didn’t test it yet with other technologies such as IMAP but it could be possible. Do note that GMail tends to be more strict on it on requires a verified e-mail client (such as Thunderbird), so it could be that it will be a bit harder to write your own client to connect to GMail if needed.
I’m not aware that the Generic Mail Receiver exists. If you want to have a “Generic” Mail Receiver then it should be possible, but your mails will then probably end in a table with columns “From”, “To”, “Subject”, “Timestamp”,… but the body of the mail will be harder to read as it can be formatted in HTML, or could contain images, or could also contain attachments -> then what to do with these?
Fully agree with Laurens. We have on multiple occasions developed drivers that ingest e-mails and process those. I recall use cases with e-mails that contained transmission schedules in the broadcast space, and a use case of a network provider that received e-mails from the power grid operator with information about planned maintenance on the power grid (so that they could automatically link HFC network outages with planned maintenance activities on the power grid – to prevent unnecessary escalations or even dispatch of field crews). But in each case it is not so much about being able to receive the mail, but more about the structure of the data contained in it (or lack thereof). In some cases the data was delivered via e-mail, but it was nicely structured in a fixed and well-defined text format, or even an XML file that was attached to the mail.