Email proce$$ing not using AwareIM email notifications

ddumas

For Email processing experts, which have an AwareIM app which lives and breathes on incoming email, and email processing in general:

I am certainly willing to pay for consulting on this, but only from someone that has an AwareIM app which lives and breathes on incoming email, and email processing in general.

I have confirmed that the AwareIM processing of incoming emails is spotty, and that Tomcat intermittently cannot connect to the IMAP account for incoming emails. This is not a question, and is from weeks of testing. I have done things like disabled the firewall, allow outbound connectivity to port 993, etc. I write to an audit table at various points in the process, and ultimately, I know from the Tomcat log that it has connection problems to the inbound email account. The incoming account and outgoing account are the same account. The outbound email processing which works fine. Slow, but ok for now.

So now I am looking at using a service, and not using AwareIM Email notifications. My app relies heavily on email communications, and email must be lightning fast and bulletproof.

My question is has anybody out there had success with using an email service, called through API calls, REST, or otherwise, through a "process" which does not use AwareIM email notifications? At this point, I am fine with having a separate and distinct program written which reads and writes to the database, and lives and breathes independent of AwareIM. In that scenario, AwareIM would just insert "message" records into a table, and the separate program would read those records and handle all outbound and inbound email processing, and updating of the database tables. AwareIM could read from those tables for queries and such. Otherwise if not a completely separate program, I would have to use an AwareIM scheduled process to look for results returned by the service, and with the issues I have had, I am not sure if that's best. I am willing to try it though as a proof of concept.

Again, I am not looking to use AwareIM email notifications processing at this point. My app runs on AWS, which is running great so far. I have an AWS consultant that can be used at any point during the project.

Thanks,

Dave

tford

Dave,

I have used Mandrill (by MailChimp) for SMTP transactional OUTGOING emails and it was worked flawlessly for years.

Mandrill also does inbound processing which I HAVE NEVER USED. It is described here:
https://mandrill.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/205583197-Inbound-Email-Processing-Overview

Based on my experience with both Mandrill & MailChimp, I would have no reason to believe there would be any issues with their inbound processing.

ddumas

That looks to me like the way to go. AWS has a service called SES (Simple Email Exchange) that I believe also has an API. Searching today, I have also seen some other 3rd party application email services as well. I am going to start a POC that replaces my AwareIM email processing with AwareIM processes calling APIs. I am hoping that a scheduled process in AwareIM to call an API to receive the inbound emails proves rock solid. Otherwise I will have to contract to have a separate program written which reads and writes DB records, and handles all email processing independently of AwareIM. I will let you know how it works out.
Dave