Funktastic Programming Adventures in Web Development

So today I am toiling away at building an automated message processing tool that will open a POP connection to a Microsoft Exchange mailbox and read all of the e-mails in the account. From these e-mails, I need to parse information that is found in the mail headers for an attached e-mail. Only problem is, the headers for the attached message are changed by Microsoft Exchange when you read the e-mail through a POP account.

So after much thought, we have decided that POP (post office protocol) isn’t going to cut it for this project. Instead, we are going to go with a custom dotNet component that was developed in-house. Despite the fact that I haven’t ever worked with dotNet here at work and would have to learn how to use both regular expressions and the database interface, this seemed like the easiest solution to my boss.

We could have done the same thing by using a free ASP IMAP component
available from the web and developed it in 1/10th the time. So this project that is already 2 weeks overdue is going to press on for another week or so. The funny part is that this is just a temporary fix to hold us until another temporary fix is put in place and finally (who knows when) a final solution is built and put in place.

All of this is necessary because Microsoft Exchange changes all of the Internet Headers that are sent through POP access. I really am starting to believe that Microsoft Exchange totally blows!