It might sound ridiculous, but I’m sure we’ve all seen it: business processes that are handled by Employee A sending an e-mail to Employee B (or a shared mailbox) and requesting an action be performed, on a regular basis.

As an example, one of our brilliant programmers is currently processing name change requests for our web based login system by hand. All the time he spends manually keying this information could be much better spent in more creative ways, i.e. cranking out good code to complete our primary mission. Not to mention the time it takes to break out of the coder’s mindset into performing tasks any brainless animal could be doing (you coders out there know what I’m talking about).

So what’s the solution? Automated mail retrieval and parsing using Linux, fetchmail, cron, and bash scripting.

More later as I work on implementing it ……..