A service developing an automatic confirmation of an email order in a shape of an email with attachments.

Nowadays many companies would prefer the orders to be placed via Internet. This especially concerns companies dedicated to advertising, image processing or any type of IT data processing. An immediate question arises: what is the way in which a client can send an order containing some data for processing? There is no easy or quick solution, especially if the data files are large or numerous. There is always the possibility of using a web interface, but it has a considerable flaw: uploading files is usually a synchronous operation, and because of that, quite a long one.

A traditional email turns out to be the easiest solution in that case, especially if a client sends it from a company's local network (connecting to a server by a fast LAN network allows quicker message sending). The question is in which way should a company receive an order and confirm it? The most flexible but also the most expensive solution is employing a person, who would view incoming emails, save the attachments on a hard drive, send a confirmation email and notify an appropriate company employee about the order placed.

All these duties have been automated in the following project. A service, which operates in a direct connection with the mail receiving MS Exchange server, tracks the incoming emails. The moment it recognizes an incoming email as an order, it selects those attachments which contain the data for processing, saves them at the company file server in a suitable folder, sends a confirmation to the client and finally sends a message about the order being placed to an appropriate employee.