Hi I have Exchange Server 2007 setup with some users with their own inbox. Since this is all related to office conversations I want to move all the incoming and outgoing mails belonging to same conversation thread to disk folder (any folder on his machine say D:\Conversation1).
I am able to let user create separate disk folder for each conversation and let him move first mail in conversation to this folder. So that is not the problem now.
Also I have written a web app which when provided the conversation ID returns the corresponding disk folder path.
However now what I want is to process all incoming & outgoing mails and auto move them to the disk folder corresponding to their conversation thread. I found two possible ways:
- Write Outlook plugin which when user logs in will intercept all incoming mails and outgoing mails find their conversation id, send it to web app I written and move them to the disk folder path returned by my web app.
- Using EWS: I could write a service for client machines which will ask for user login and based on that login cred it will connect to Exchange server using Exchange Server Webservices (EWS) and will then do the same thing as above. However here it will require to periodically poll / ask Exchange Server to check if their are any new mails sent / received through by the user who provided the login credentials. In outlook plugin I need not do such periodic requests - I could just write code on new incoming / outgoing mail handlers.
Q. Is there any better approach to achieve this through EWS than as explained above.
Main Q. What I find wrong with both above approaches is that - my functionality is same for all mails accounts / users. So why need user to log in just for movement of mails. Can I write something like Exchange Server Tasks ( - a server side code instead of client side code as it was the case with both above approaches) which will continuously process all mails (from all mail accounts configured on Exchange Server) find their conversation IDs and with the help of my web app move them to the corresponding disk folder.
Details that you may ignore
- I have Outlook 2010 configured for users.
- I have a repository setup that will manage storage of mails in folder. Yes this repository will be own its own machine - not on the exchange server. But eventually it will be on hard disk, so referring them as "disk folder" is still no wrong.
- Also you can think of that web app as a part of repository handling. So it runs on repository machine. Just didn't mentioned above to reduce details and focus on which approaches available and preferable - simple and clean.