What methods are there for having .NET code run and handle e-mails as they arrive?

Question

I\'ve been tasked with creating some sort of service that will take any e-mail sent to an e-mail address and handle the contents of the e-mail (including binary attachments.

Answer 1

Receiving the email is not the hardest part, parsing, extracting attachments is.

If any one is interested in commercial product take a look at Mail.dll. It supports IDLE command you have mentioned for instant notifications.

Mail.dll includes POP3, IMAP clients and powerful MIME parser:

using(Imap imap = new Imap())
{
    imap.Connect("imap.server.com");
    imap.Login("user", "password");

    imap.SelectInbox();
    List uidList = imap.SearchFlag(Flag.Unseen);
    foreach (long uid in uidList)
    {
        IMail mail = new MailBuilder()
            .CreateFromEml(imap.GetMessageByUID(uid));
        Console.WriteLine(mail.Subject);
    }
    imap.Close(true);
}

Please note that this is commercial product that I've created.

You can download it at http://www.lesnikowski.com/mail