really dumb question about email..
Matt Hardiman
I've been asked to write planning a delivery system that will allow some of
our most remote offices to access material from london - all the material is
referenced by users by a ten digit name. Currently the users ISDN to the
servers in London and use an intranet interface I wrote several years ago
for this material but the call costs form these remote sites are very high
(all our other sites are on the company WAN).
The solution I've come up with is that the users only need to send -
somehow - a list of the required items, the system will then convert the
required items to the desired format and FTP to our public FTP servers (in a
protected area). This way the remote offices will only need a local ISP
connection and they will not require direct contact through our firewalls.
The problem...
Inside our firewall, we have access to the public FTP servers, our internal
email system (MS exchange) and a few UNIX smtp servers.
I reckon I've got to broad choices:
1) the remote users upload a text file list to the public FTP server which
is then polled by the delivery system. It then does the work and pushes the
required files up
2) the users email an account in London and this email triggers the system
with the system FTPing the files to the public servers and then replying to
the email with a report.
Option 2 seems more user friendly but I don;t know how easy it would be to
do - would it be easier to work with MS exchange servers or smtp?
Reliabilty and speed - strangely enough - are very high priorities
I'm not sure what I'm asking to be honest probably does anyone have any
experience of this wort of thing or just any comments. I'm open to ideas!
Thanks
matt
Kudzu - Team Indy
>Option 2 seems more user friendly but I don;t know how easy it would be to
>do - would it be easier to work with MS exchange servers or smtp?
SMTP is pretty easy, esp with good components. The drawback is mail causes
all files to grow by 33% in size during transit.
--
Chad Z. Hower (Kudzu) - Church Hill, TN - Team Indy
"Programming is an art form that fights back"
Forget the Y2K problem, Lets fix the W2K problem.
http://www.pbe.com/Kudzu/ - Free Delphi/CBuilder components and articles
J. Peter Mugaas
a copy was sent to the cited author.]
In article <3aea04b5$1_2@dnews>, newsg...@matti.co.uk says...
> [snip]
> Inside our firewall, we have access to the public FTP servers, our internal
> email system (MS exchange) and a few UNIX smtp servers.
>
> I reckon I've got to broad choices:
>
> 1) the remote users upload a text file list to the public FTP server which
> is then polled by the delivery system. It then does the work and pushes the
> required files up
>
> 2) the users email an account in London and this email triggers the system
> with the system FTPing the files to the public servers and then replying to
> the email with a report.
>
> Option 2 seems more user friendly but I don;t know how easy it would be to
> do - would it be easier to work with MS exchange servers or smtp?
>
I would think SMTP could do it.
My suggestion idea might be to somehow setup a webserver and have the
HTTP Server accept Post requests from remote offices and reply with the
requested item which the clients download. This would also have one
advantage in that unlike FTP, HTTP uses one port instead of two.
Indy (http://www.nevrona.com) does have a HTTP Client and server
component. In addition, you might be able to utilize SSL (Secure
Sockets Layer) for networking security.
--
Support the anti-Spam amendment - Join at http://www.cauce.org/
J. Peter Mugaas E-Mail: oma0...@mail.wvnet.edu
http://wvnvm.wvnet.edu/~oma00215/ ICQ Number: 14297043
Finger for PGP Key