Hi all!
A customer asked me to produce a solution like a crm. He asked me to manage email messages (incoming and outgoing) for every contact in the crm.
In another solution I have already managed otugoing email messages with a little attachment using an our smtp auth server, so that will not be a problem (i think).
My question is: what kind of problem i will find developing a solution like I wrote here above?
I think I’ll connect to the mail server as pop3…
Any other suggestion you can give me will be accepted!
Many thanks!
POP3 isn’t the best protocol for this type of thing. One would typically use IMAP.
However, I would be asking how big is your customer? If it is small to medium sized, mail servers have rules engines which can be used to sort messages into folders and trigger actions. Here are some example rules engines (which I have not tried myself):
http://gaillourdet.net/2011/05/server-side-imap-filtering-done-right/
https://cyrusimap.org/index.php
You could have a console application(s) being sent emails or monitoring folders (using IMAP) maintained by the rules engine. This could contain your customer business logic and would run as a service/daemon.
You could use a Web App for your customer interface to your Console application(s) or maybe the email server direct if you only have simple needs.
Whether or not mail server rules would prove fast enough for your needs would depend on the size of your customer’s requirements. For high performance, messages might be archived into a database.
Of course spam filters might black-list your customer if you bulk email.
There is no good IMAP lib for Xojo. At the moment I’m having fun with declares for the Imap component of https://www.chilkatsoft.com . Parsing emails is a lot of fun. If you send individual mails the SMTP server should be okay. For bulk there are MailChimp, Aweber and the like.
I have used Xojo to create a business intelligence app that monitors data sources and raises emails for my client’s customers as a service to them. However this is not the same type of thing as scanning emails and sorting them, which rules engines do and which would be fiddly to code from scratch. Wish there was built-in SSL IMAP support but people need to vote for it: <https://xojo.com/issue/33919>
I’d rather pay someone for a good plugin or some code. Xojo is moving way to slow with stuff like that. See the thread about secure SMTP socket not working properly.
The simplest way in Xojo is Pop/Smtp.
Pop belongs to a dying breed.
Maybe. Although I would not bet on it dying just yet. But it is more difficult to implement in Xojo. That’s all I say.