Java Enterprise Best Practices

Email for System Integration

Most developers are familiar with controlling remote applications via email. Almost anyone who has ever subscribed to a mailing list has emailed a subscription request, a status change, or an unsubscribe to [e-mail], and received a response indicating that action was taken. More recently, emails to customer service addresses at major companies are read first by software, which attempts to match them to a set of prewritten FAQs, and then are passed to a human only if no relevant FAQ can be found. Even then, the human customer service employees might handle the request via a web interface that serves up each incoming message, allows them to enter a response, and dispatches the result back to the customer.