Publish nightly received e-mails on FTP server

Question

The goal is to publish the attachments of received e-mails as soon as possible on an FTP server. These e-mails are sent at night, manual work is impossible. The mail server these e-mails are received on is Microsoft Exchange with complex login procedure.

Not-so-great solutions found so far:

Computer in house

• Leave a computer somewhere in my house running outlook
• Create a macro that stores the e-mail on a ftp server
• source http://www.pixelchef.net/content/rule-autosave-attachment-outlook

Connect to MS Exchange via script

• Periodically run a python script to fetch attachments and store on FTP
• No library found that can handle the complex login procedure
• source https://pypi.python.org/pypi/exchangelib/

Run own FTP & mailserver

• Running a mailserver and FTP on the same server
• Creating a rule to store specific attachments to FTP folder
• For example using mail-in-a-box and sieve

All these solutions are not so great for a seamingly easy problem :(

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

Make a rule to forward the mail you are interested in to a 'service user'

Write a windows service which connects to the exchange server every 5 min and checks for new mails in the service users inbox. downloads the attachment, copies it to the ftp server and delete the email.

Use .net as microsoft provide libraries to connect to exchange and active directory.

If you don't have your own server, install the service on the exchange server itself. Which may also alleviate your login problems.

Alternatively such a small service should run on a free tier of azure, which you can also use to host the ftp site if required