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One thing that is coming to me from the top is the ability to respond to an email notification to approve or deny it. This behavior would be similar to many mailing lists were you hit reply to approve the subscription or send to a different email address to deny. How would I do this in an Exchange and ASP.NET environment? Are there any examples of someone else doing this?

I currently do this via a link in the email, but if they are on their phones or out of the office, they can't access the intranet application.

Mike Wills
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  • Where I work these mails usually have an option to vote. The sender specifies the vote options so they can just be YES or NO. Only works with Outlook afaik. Just thought I'd mention this alternative answering method. – Peter Mar 31 '11 at 14:17
  • @Peter Does that work on smart phones. That is really when they want this feature. – Mike Wills Mar 31 '11 at 14:23
  • I honestly have no clue, sorry. This is the feature I meant: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook-help/add-voting-buttons-to-a-message-HP005242171.aspx Perhaps one of your clients can try it out? – Peter Mar 31 '11 at 14:35

3 Answers3

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You'll have to monitor the incoming mailbox and respond to keywords in the email (subject or body). If you want to perform multiple actions (ie approve or deny), the simplest way is to create mailto links in the email body. That way, the mailto links will include your keywords (approve, deny, whatever) in the subject line when clicked.

Tundey
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I built an application like this about six years ago. Basically, we configured the mail server to execute a script when a certain address received an email.

So, if the mail server received an email at trigger@domain.com, then the mail server executes the local program. You can wire this to ASP.NET by having the executed script issue and http request to the ASP.NET application.

The specific implementation is going to be dependent on your mail server and the software you use to manage it.

smartcaveman
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  • We are using Exchange 2007 I believe. – Mike Wills Mar 31 '11 at 14:45
  • @Mike, you can probably find the information you need at [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa165887(v=office.10).aspx](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa165887(v=office.10).aspx) . I also found [this article](http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb123864(EXCHG.65).aspx) about the MS Exchange message flow, which should have what you need to determine the appropriate injection point. – smartcaveman Mar 31 '11 at 14:59
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I know that you´re using Exchange and maybe this answer is not quite helpful for you. I used a custom email server once for doing something similar to what you´re saying. The implementation was based on this C# email server.

uvita
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