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My goal is to build a system where each user has an email address to which he can forward e-mails. From these emails the system should take: subject, date, recipient, text. This data should go into a database with a unique ID per mail and user.

Now I know this doesn't sound that complicated, but I am wondering which programming language to use. Also I wonder how to host the email, since there will be quite some email addresses and there should be some job running to detect when new emails are coming in.

Not very experienced at this so hoping that some of you could give me some tips to look into. I hope this question is not too general - I did my best to be specific. All input is very much appreciated.

Thanks, Vincent

Vincent
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  • I think you need to provide a few more constraints to your question. What you're trying to achieve is pretty simple but there are a large number of ways of doing it. Are you looking for a free or paid software stack (Linux/Windows/SQL Server/MySQL). What languages do you know? What databases do you use? – David Hayes May 23 '12 at 14:47
  • Thank you David. Until now I have only built something on Google App Engine / Python, so Python would probably make most sense. Not sure if GAE itself would be suitable though. Preferably it would be free, but minor costs are also ok. I don't have any databases in place since I am starting from scratch. – Vincent May 23 '12 at 15:00

1 Answers1

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Essentially you need three components

  1. A Mail Server (to receive the emails) Look at MS Exchange (Windows) or Postfix (Linux) as examples
  2. Some code to parse the incoming emails, you could use almost anything to do this
  3. A database, look at SQL Server, My SQL as examples

Your question is a bit broad to give more specific advice

David Hayes
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  • So I guess the most important consideration is the mail server since it defines what is possible in the future as well. I saw that MS Exchange is a paid solution, would that mean that Postfix is my best alternative? Or is there also the possibility to use an online solution (easy as e.g. GMail) for now until I have proven the concept I intend to develop? – Vincent May 23 '12 at 15:07