A Programmatically Accessible Email Archive?

JohnnyConatus asks: "Does anyone know of a service that offers corporate email archiving and also provides a read-only interface for accessing the archived emails programmatically? Ideally this would be in the form of an database connection or a web service. My current employer is required by the SEC to archive all email communication with clients and we would like to incorporate the archived emails into our internal applications. I have called just about every email archive service I could find via Google, and while most offer a web application to search the emails, none so far have a solution for doing so programmatically. For various reasons, archiving the emails ourselves is considered the last resort. If we had to implement archiving locally, a program that archived by acting as a mail gateway would be the ideal since we'll be supporting a wide-range of mail servers."

IMAP

[g_bowskill]

If all of the emails are stored in an imap account then you could access this programatically using PHP's Imap functions. I do the same thing using a cron job to check an email account every 5 minutes on my site, if theres a new mail it looks to see if it has an image attachment and if it has automatically posts it online for me.

Information about PHP's Imap functions can be found at http://uk.php.net/imap [php.net].

I'm not entirely sure if this is the kind've thing you are looking for, but this is probably how I would deal with the problem.

Regards,

Grant

You missed the obvious

[spribyl]

You said to did a google search but did you talk the the obvious choice. Google.

They seems to have something of a specialty in archiving e-mail and search technology and usually have some kind of API.