Parsing Email & Standards

I’m by no means a newbie when it comes to parsing email but for the past few days I’ve been looking at the application contents of email messages and really wishing there was a standard, or perhaps a standard most people would adhere to.

The big idea: Parse all incoming messages and handle support requests in one way, system alerts, notifications and application events in another.

If you are using Shockey Monkey I really hope you can open up either a trouble or development ticket with a sample copy of the type of message you receive from the remote appliance, monitoring service, helpdesk, etc. The goal of course is to parse these dumb reports and apply some intelligence to them. For example, the alert you just got – is it just a notification you can’t do squat about (“Exchange is allocating more ram than usual”) or is it perhaps something you’d want to look at immediately (“Exchange mail store process has stopped.”); Thats just one of the examples but there are many different types of alerts and notifications that could be imported and managed in the system.

I did get pretty creative with my parser security today. Checking if the user exists. If the user doesn’t exist, check if the message is coming from a host listed on a major RBL and if it is, don’t shoot back an automatic notification to help them sign up. If you just received a known notification don’t send back the reponse, just silently open one up in the Shockey Monkey portal. Copy X headers from the previous notification into the new one and simulate a reply instead of generating a whole new message. Track back and throttle senders. Control for possibility of infinite loops and temporarily graylist senders….

You know, the fun stuff on a beautiful summer day 

I’ve got to say, I am impressed with the way Shockey Monkey has been handling over the last few months. The load on the system has been growing exponentially but the resources seem to be very much in check. Wonder what happens when I introduce the AJAX patchset. I have to say that I love it on our portal but I’m also the one that designed it so…. huge grain of salt along with that one.