3

Here is the reason for my peculiar question:

I am working on a mortgage application for a mortgage broker where each mortgage application is a record. Now this broker will take each of the applications he has received and enter this application (in an up line lender's system) and during the life of this mortgage application, he receives notification emails about updates from the up line lender.

It is required that in this application, all emails pertaining to a particular mortgage application are visible under that record.

My plan is to have all emails collect in a single inbox, and give that inbox an alias corresponding to the record id of the mortgage record. The alias remains active as long as the mortgage application is active and the broker cares for receiving these updates. Once the mortgage application record is dead, that alias is removed.

When displaying the particular mortgage record, I can query the mail server for the emails where the to address is the alias of that particular record.

My key requirements are:

  1. The email server or email service should allow for about 400-500 aliases at a time.
  2. Should have an API interface for creating and deleting an alias.

As far as the creating/deleting API is concerned, Google Apps (https://developers.google.com/admin-sdk/directory/v1/guides/manage-user-aliases) really fits the requirement, but has a 30 alias limit.

Does Microsoft Outlook online mail support this kind of API and ability to create mailbox alias?

If we went in the direction of having a Microsoft Exchange Server 2010/2013, would it allow programmatic access to create aliases? What would be the license cost?

Thanks in advance for looking this up.

With update from @mti2935, I am considering a catch-all solution rather then deal with creating aliases.

So, now I think all I need is to be able to process the emails. What's the best means of processing emails (in my case, I will simply have to look at the "to" field and put the emails in different buckets).

I have found a third party service that can help me parse emails. Definitely going to try that out and provide an update here. Service: https://postmarkapp.com/inbound Referenced by a post on: How to setup a mail server?

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Moiz Tankiwala
  • 6,070
  • 7
  • 38
  • 51
  • 1
    I don't know if this is pertinent, but did you consider the myemail+tag at gmail.com trick? – Stefano Falasca Jul 30 '13 at 10:51
  • @StefanoFalasca Can you tell me what is the myemail+tag trick that you are referring to. I don't know it and my search for the same did not yield any useful results. Thanks in advance. – Moiz Tankiwala Jan 15 '14 at 07:47
  • 2
    let's say your gmail address is moiz@gmail.com every address like moiz+stackoverflow@gmail.com, moiz+images@gmail.com, moiz+whatever@gmail.com will reach you – Stefano Falasca Jan 15 '14 at 07:49
  • Great! I didn't know that. This can be really handy not just for the problem that I am having, but in general in dealing with email! Thanks a lot. Will definitely try it out. – Moiz Tankiwala Jan 15 '14 at 07:52
  • it is very useful for when you subscribe to website, so that you can apply filters on the "to" address, instead of using the sender (which might be not unique). – Stefano Falasca Jan 15 '14 at 08:22

1 Answers1

2

One option to consider is to setup a mail server using qmail, configured as a catch-all for your domain, such that all mail to *@yourdomain.tld forwards to a script which parses each incoming message, scrapes the to, from, subject, etc. logs the messages in your database, etc. It's easier than it sounds to setup. See How to setup a mail server?. This can be done fairly inexpensively on a Rackspace or AWS cloud server.

Community
  • 1
  • 1
mti2935
  • 11,465
  • 3
  • 29
  • 33
  • Catch all is a very good suggestion. I can totally do away with the alias creation, deletion overhead! Thanks a lot for that. Probably, Google Apps can work in this case (as the 30 alias limitation will not be applicable). – Moiz Tankiwala Jul 30 '13 at 12:29
  • Exactly. And, it eliminates the need for an API too. The rules are simply database records. – mti2935 Jul 30 '13 at 12:32