Is this something I should be placing on the cloud

Question

Would the cloud be the right choice for the following scenario.  I want to have an application sitting on a cloud server somewhere that waits for emails to come in. When an email comes in I want the application to open it and examine it and if it is an email that is being looked for then some of the contents of the email will be matched with an existing database record (because those details have already been collected) and then an e-mail notification will be sent out by the application to the original email sender.

So, on one side the application receives data from a remote server and on the other the application receives emails and processes them and sends out a reply.

So, the question is, would this type of application be suitable for the cloud and would it be a costly entity  to host on the cloud.

The other question that I would have is that I know (in principle) how to point at a remote data base and access records what I don't quite know yet is how to handle the e-mail processing which I think is more than likely carried out by IMAP.

But, conceptually, the thing that has me puzzled at the moment is what type of application should this be designed with as it has to be running the whole time. My initial premise would be that it should be a Visual studio 2010 windows form application.

Be great to get this up and running quickly so any assistance would be  very much appreciated.

Thanks in advance,

Robert.

 

Answer 1

Hi,

What i understand from the scenario is, you would need an application that monitors the mails and compare the mail against the data in DB.

MAPI or IMAP is very hard to code and its difficult to manage.

If your email server is exchange server you could implemnt a WCF that listens to your message as described in this MSDN article.

If you see it is doesn't suit your needs.

The solution can be very well deployed on the cloud as long the exchange server can be accessed over internet.

Also take a look at the exchange web services.

setps to grant permissions to the mail boxes are given here.

This solution can also be deployed on the cloud.

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Answer 2

conceptually you may think about an Azure Worker Role which runs as kind of a service in the cloud. As far I understand you don't need a user interface, so a background worker should be sufficient. Beside the mentioned challenges accessing and parsing the email input, this could be well deployed to Azure. Depending on the load and # of mails to process you can start small e.g. using xtra-small instances and scale your solution on demand.

There have been couple discussions here in the past about sending emails from within Azure, and there are also bunch of solutions available for standard IMAP/POP handling, or else as mentioned you may use some WCF if your mailservice support this.

Overall sounds like a valid scenario for Azure, I'd assume most challenges in email processing but the Azure part should be straight forward.