Moises

Yes it is in principle. We are running an app dialing up Zurich from London and pushing data into the Zurich database.

There are a few things you need to think about:-

1. We wanted the Zurich office to press a button to input the data. In this they are saying that they are ready and that this data is the data they want.

2. Is the data to be read from the body of the email or from an attachment?

3. Life becomes much simpler if the email client at the other end is very simple. We use Eudora because it stores its file attachments as files in an attachments directory. I would tend to keep clear of Outlook - opening its file attachments is becoming a nightmare even with the help of Nigel Coates and his Mapimail.

This is how we operate.

The London office sends the email (the file attachment always has the same name.) The Zurich office has a polling program which runs all the time looking in the email attachments directory for a file which is called MANIFEST?.DBF Incidentally, files in this directory are automatically numered by the email system on receipt as MANIFEST1.DBF MANIFEST2.DBF etc. The highest number is always the latest file. To be on the safe side we sort the attachments into descending date order. When it finds a file it hasn't yet processed it pops up a message for the operator. The operator presses OK and the data is appended into the database.

We also have a system which takes data from about 500 customers, selects the format the customer uses, find the right import procedure and loads their data into the database. The customer data is either file attachments (of varying formats) or body of text messages (of varying formats)

I am not too concerned about firewalls but I am concerned about viruses. We cannot guarantee that our customers do not have virusses, they often do. After a long deliberation we chose Sophos and McAffee as our AV systems. Do NOT use Norton Av on workstations running VFP on a Win2k or Winnt network - it locks up the VFP system.

Hope this helps

Colin Northway