How can i add email support with asp.net mvc application?

Question

I am working on one asp.net mvc project. In which I want the facility of customer feedback. Suppose I have sent email for getting feedback on our services. So we are sending emails to customers. They gives answer via Reply of that email. And we want to save that reply automatically in database tables. Its sure that we will receive email on one our fixed email address. So basically i want to store the reply of email from customers into the database with that customer email id. please note here Customers reply email id will be the unique customer field for me. Is this possible? How can i achieve such functionality? Please suggest me. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Saving email replies has nothing to do with asp.net mvc per se. having said that, here are some solutions that you can evaluate:

1. assuming all the replies go to a designated mailbox (Exchange or whatever), you can setup filters (e.g. VBA files in Exchange) which can intercept the incoming emails, parse them and save it to the data base.
2. if you don't want to mess with mail server native filters, you can write an offline utility (C# console app, windows service, powershell script etc.) which can query a Mailbox and parse the emails and save it to the database.

All of the above approaches have their pros/cons based on ease of installation, logging, maintainability etc.

p.s. please discard the below if it doesn't make any sense for you.

an uber advice i have always received for customer feedback design problems is to get as much objective data as possible. (as opposed to unstructured textual content in an email) and to get objective data,

1. one option is to have a feedback form on the website where users fill in definitive fields and you can save the information in a very structured and objective manner.
2. another option is to send them an email with a link to the feedback form on the site, so that if not immediately, they can leisurely come back to the same site and you collect objective data the same way.

saves you the trouble of parsing emails, trying to save email documents, parsing html/string contents, manual intervention to interpret sentiments of the email etc.