design advice wanted: linking emails to fabrik records

[skyrun]

looking for advice on the best way to store and display an email from within a fabrik list or form for a customer service app where i'm trying to link emails into customer activity records.

i am getting the emails, processing and filing them and creating a fabrik row for each one. then i would like to show an icon on the list and form and when clicked, display the email (and eventually write code to reply to it also... but display for now).

as an overall approach, should i store the emails in files and link to them? should i leave the emails in an imap directory and reference them via php? store the emails as 'text' in the database?

there will eventually be 10's of thousands of them...

just starting to think it thorough and if anyone has advice, let me know.

 

[skyrun]

i think i may have it sorted out...

i am considering storing the files on the linux file system (in a spot accessible to my webserver) as .eml files (.eml is a standard mime time). then store a link to the file on fabrik. then when i click on the link, it launches my workstation email program automatically (whatever program is set to handle .eml... thunderbird does and i would presume others would too) which handles all the attachments, etc and even lets me reply! seems like a pretty slick way to archive an email within a fabrik app.

i am also storing sound file recordings of phone calls (permission based of course) with the same scheme so when clicked, a sound player is launched and i can hear the recorded call.

if anyone else has other ideas, chime in.

 

[cheesegrits]

If it's not too much of a hassle storing them as individual .eml's, I think that sounds like the best bet.

-- hugh