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 SSIS and Import/Export (2008)
 Email import

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Loisbl
Starting Member

2 Posts

Posted - 2013-02-07 : 13:35:22
I am receiving a series of emails from a particular source. The emails are in a standard template, come into my Microsft Outlook account on the company network, and I want to import the data into my database automatically. I have no control over the format of the email, and I do not have access to the email server other than as a user. How can I set up an import of the body of the email? I would like to parse it into specific columns, but first I jsut need to get the data into the DB itself. Any thoughts or suggestions other than 3rd party software which I am not allowed to use? It seems I should be able to do this in SSIS, but I can not find a way to set up the email account as a datasource, much less specify what folder or from addres to pull.

James K
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker

3873 Posts

Posted - 2013-02-07 : 17:11:41
Mail that comes to you into Outlook gets written to a .pst file. So you have to find some way to parse that and extract the mails that are of interest to you in a text file form.

There are third party tools which I know you have ruled out that can do this. One I have used is - OutlookEMLAndMSGConverter and it is very inexpensive.

Barring that, the only other suggestion I have is to write a .Net program to use Outlook API to connect to the .pst file, read the data, parse it and store it into the database. Outlook has a well-documented API, so this should not be very difficult, but it is time-consuming to get all the i's dotted and t's crossed.

If SSIS does have a component that allows you to work with pst files, I am not aware of it.
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Loisbl
Starting Member

2 Posts

Posted - 2013-02-08 : 10:41:44
OK - Thank you for the feedback.
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James K
Master Smack Fu Yak Hacker

3873 Posts

Posted - 2013-02-08 : 11:05:35
Lois, if you find a clean solution to the problem, can you post back with your findings, so all can learn?
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