using an email address for referrals

[sist_si]

Hi there,

Can anyone help with this. I'm just wondering what would be involved in the following:

Several 3rd party sites have an email link to my site. Each email address is unique to the site it is on but go via a domain I own. The unique part of it will contain a referral code which will allow me to track the site the email has come from so, a simple version may look like:

[email protected] - Site 1
[email protected] - Site 2
[email protected] - Site 3

when an email comes in, I want to be able to pick it up and log the referral in my MSSQL DB based on the unique part of the address.

I presume I'd need something to sit on the mail server monitoring incoming mails? What would the best programming lang be for this?
I was thinking something in Python maybe (I'm v.new to this) or .NET?

Do you see where I'm coming from? Any advice would be appreciated!

 

[sist_si]

anyone?

 

[daz]

I'd imagine you'd want a single shared mailbox, with the email addresses forwarding (or perhaps a catch-all forwarding) to the mailbox. A script would then periodically POP the mailbox (perhaps a cron) to get the mails and then parse the data and pop it in the database if it's valid.

PHP and MySQL would be pretty straightforward, but I'm sure ASP .Net could do it easily enough too.

 

[sist_si]

hmm, ok. I see where you're coming from here
It is a Windows 2k3 server but I was hoping this could be a nice project in Python. ANyway, I'll have a little search