Email Piping / Parsing

[versatilewt]

I have a system currently wherein multiple customers are managed by multiple sales reps. These customers/reps have back and forth conversationss before a sale is closed. There is a link in each email that gets sent to the customers that they are asked to click and fill out a subject/body reply from through so that their reply is posted through this sales system. However, few customers do this, and reps end up with cluttered and hard to manage inboxes.

 

What I would ultimately like to do is have is I guess like a "trouble ticket" system functionality, where a user will simply reply to an email sent to them using their mail client's reply button and do the "reply above this line" thing, and then have this sent to a script that parses it and posts the reply to the appropriate order so that the rep can keep track of the conversation with the customer.

 

However, what is complicating the situation to me is, how do I keep track of which order the message should be posted to? Each order has a unique number, but would I need a unique email alias for each order that would forward to an email address that the script reads from? Or would I need a unique email address for each sales rep's orders to be tracked at, with the order number in the subject of the email or somewhere in the body of the email?

 

Any suggestions on programs to look at, etc etc? Thanks for the help.

[TheOne17]

I am not sure I completely understand your problem (not sure you do either). I would send an email out with a link in and place any info you want returned in a query string which you then just parse with a PHP script back to your database.

[Destruction]

TheOne17:  It appears the problem is this is what they're doing, but customers are simply replying directly to the emails instead of using the links. 

 

Versatilewt:  Personally I would think the current system would work fine if the customers knew they couldn't simply email back.  I would suggest firstly using an unmonitored email address, stating that it is and setting up an autoresponder so that if they reply, they get an email straight back saying that if they've replied to a ticket they should click the link as this is an unmonitored address.  This will save you creating a system to handle the other and the additional processing etc.

 

If you are still looking for a way to do this there are tutorials out there on how to use shell scripting to forward emails through a php script etc.  Otherwise you could write a script with imap functions (handles pop3 etc too) in order to parse the emails and set it as a cron.  If you want a more "live" or "realtime" solution I wouldn't really suggest this.  I had a link for a tutorial on evolt if i remember correctly, I'll look it up in a bit and let you know if I find it.

 

Dest