There are lots of ways that you can do this.

Email, FTP or using a Web server. If all you need is to receive files and batch process them (ie. the client needs no response) FTP is one of the easiest ways to do it. Send the file and process it later whenever the server application gets to it. You can optionally use EMAIL to confirm receipt and success of the process.

You can do almost the same thing with email, by sending messages to a specific email address and parsing that email box to retrieve files. Email is faster for the client, but more data travels over the wire due to encoding. It can also take longer to get there depending on the client's mail server, and it's very difficult to track send failures because email only tells you that a message's been submitted, not whether it was actually received as it's an async protocol.

If you need a response from the server immediately upon processing using the Web and HTTP is the way to go. You can 'upload' a file to the server, then have the server process it and immediately provide a response back to the client. You can also do more fancy stuff like actually pass DBF files back and forth directly or use XML for more flexible solutions.

Take a look at:

http://www.west-wind.com/articles.asp

Specifically look for the Distributed Applications with HTTP and the XML Messaging articles which describe the latter process in some amount of detail.

If you do email or FTP you can also look at wwIPStuff, which supports SMTP email (but only sending not receiving) and FTP...

http://www.west-wind.com/wwipstuff.asp


Regards,

+++ Rick ---



>I have to send / receive and process dbf files through the internet from remote sites.
>My pb is that those sites have only e-mail adress (via a provider).
>
>My first reaction was to use e-mails with attached files. Is it the good way or is there another (easier) way to do it ?
>
>What techno should i used?
>Have you some advices/tips/samples ?
>
>TIA