Email send/recieve integration solution for Sharepoint

Question

I have a question what is possible with regards to integrating email into SharePoint.

The Goal:

Our HR department want to try and consolidate all job applications into a SharePoint 'recruitment' portal. A requirement is that all emails that are addressed to '[email protected]' get pulled into SP. When a mail is received, it checks to see if the email address exists to an existing Candidate object, and then associates accordingly. HR then not only want to see all mails associated to a Candidate (a Conversation History if you will), but also reply from SharePoint.

What I have done so far:

So far I have created a document library with an 'incoming' email address, and am receiving email into this list. I think with a little extra code/logic, we can then associate the recipient email address to an existing Candidate object.

The Current Problem with Current Solution:

So the 'problem' I see with this current solution, all it is doing is saving a saved email object to the library. In order to read the mail, the user needs to save the email object, and then open it externally in their Outlook application. Not really making a worthwhile improvement to their existing flow.

So my question is - How Can This Be Improved?

Has anybody seen or have experiencing in managing email more effeciently in SharePoint? I know SP is more of a 'library' and 'list' directory, and maybe this might be going out the scope of what SharePoint is designed for, but is more customizing possible?

What I suppose Im asking is, how can I extract more data from an incoming mail, and create a custom email object with it? So clicking on the mail item will show you the content of the mail, etc. Without necessarily needing to 'download' the mail object and then opening it externally.

Any solutions or advice would be greatly appreciated..! thanks :)

Answer 1

There's a lot of options here...

The "obvious" one (at least for a developper) would be to attach an ER to the incoming-email doc lib (I assume we can keep that doc lib, since it's anyway a good way to easily catch emails).

Once the email is received, our ER triggers and gets the content of the .eml file. It then needs to parse that content to understand its format (plain text, HTML...) and extract it (I'm sure we can find C# libraries to do that part of the job).

You may then store that content in a Rich Text field of the doc lib, or in another list.