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Every night we receive a number of backup notification emails from our customers. These advise whether the backup jobs completed successfully or failed.
Monitoring these backups is a manual task - reading the emails and noting the status on a spreadsheet.
I am looking at how this can be automated by having the emails either populate a spreadsheet, or maybe update some kind of internally hosted website.
Can anyone suggest some ways this could be accomplished?
backupr
Posted 2014-08-04T15:25:08.950
Reputation: 1
1A customer program that checked the email account, parsed the emails, then generated a CSV file might be the way to go – Ramhound – 2014-08-04T15:31:30.720
You'll have to do something with that csv file though. As, there's not compatibility from .csv to .xlsx. – Mr. Hargrove – 2014-08-04T15:33:41.780
As a suggestion, perhaps you should re-examine your problem as a whole and look into a more standardized tracking/logging solution instead of rolling your own overcomplicated automation process. – DanteTheEgregore – 2014-08-04T16:39:32.817
Thanks for these comments. I appreciate the input.
DanteTheEgregore - I agree that the overall system could do with standardizing, but I'd like to see if something can be done in the interim.
@Ramhound - I like the idea of a program parsing the mail and importing to maybe csv, or into a MySQL db that I could do something with. Do you know any programs that can parse Exchange / Mapi mailboxes? Ideally an open-source one. – backupr – 2014-08-05T07:51:10.170
@backupr - The code require to check an email account is about 100 lines in C#. What you require would need to be a custom program you write yourself. The only other option might be a plug-in or VBScript macro within Outlook that would parse the email looking for the data and catenate the data into the clipboard. – Ramhound – 2014-08-05T11:58:53.717
@Ramhound Point taken. Thanks for the comments. – backupr – 2014-08-05T15:04:58.837