Re: [exim] OT: Extracting information from an email

Peter

On Thu, 2008-05-08 at 14:40 +0100, Peter Bowyer wrote:
> On 08/05/2008, Steve Dobson <steve@???> wrote:
> Rather than answer your question, can I suggest an alternative
> approach - how about Amazon SQS? It's a reliable message-queue service
> 'in the sky' designed for exactly the sort of thing you're describing,
> with a web services API and toolkits in various languages. Other
> services are probably available.
>
> Just a thought...

Thanks for the thought but it doesn't work. For a start it is
infinitely more expensive than e-mail. E-mail is free, Amazon SQS
charges $0.000001 per request. Okay, trivial I grant you but why should
I pay anything if there is a cheaper alternative. We are talking market
forces here.

You're also assuming that the server will have access to the net. Not
guaranteed. Brain dead polices are to blame, but I have to live with
them. Amazon SQS states no special firewall configurations but it does
require an Internet connection. How would this work on a site that
doesn't allow any outbound connection to all but a few machines?

After long discussions with the client I came to the conclusion that
e-mails were the only way to go, because attaching a spreadsheet to an
e-mail is the current manual way to transport this data. The only thing
I know is that e-mail works.

The Excel files are way bigger than they need to be for the data being
transmitted. So by using e-mails and can use the current transport
system for my data transfer. E-mails work as a universal transport
system. If the site really doesn't allow direct Internet connection
then some poor loser can save the attachment and walk the data file over
to the server on a USB key.

I didn't want to put all that in the original posting as this is an OT
thread.

Any chance you could point me to the documentation now?

Steve


--
Steve Dobson

I want to see people using Perl to glue things together creatively, not
just technically but also socially.
-- Larry Wall in <199702111730.JAA28598@???>