One of our customers is sending mails regularly with attachments in an automated fashion. We'd like to automate saving attachments of these mails to a network share for further processing. Is there a way to setup such rule in Exchange Server?
Maybe it is possible to setup such a rule in Outlook, but I am specifically interested achieving this with a server side rule so it is not necessary to download mails with Outlook at all.
I have no experience with administrating Exchange server (I am a developer), but our administrators told there is no way of doing this.
However after some google search I found some commercial solutions: e.g. https://www.codetwo.com/exchange-rules-pro/attachment-control
So there must be a way to develop such a rule if it is really not available out of the box. I am also interested in how such custom rules could be developed.
Btw what would your arguments be to convince IT sec to allow installing a commercial extension to Exchange Server?
Tried checking built-in actions of Exchange Transport rules but haven't found any that manages attachments.
You haven't mentioned which version of Exchange Server you are using. However, as far as I know, automatic saving of attachments is currently not available out of the box in any version.
The commercial product you linked requires the installation of software (Exchange Rules Service) on every Exchange Server with a mailbox role. This service is part of the commercial product and integrates into the server's mail processing process to handle the extended rule set based on conditions.
The product is used by many companies. However, it's worth mentioning that any third-party product on an Exchange Server can potentially cause issues, especially when it comes to updates, security risks, and manufacturer support. There may also be security policies that prohibit the use of third-party products on Exchange Servers.
As a developer, you might be able to write a tool that can save attachments to a network share via EWS (Exchange Web Services). For example, you could use an EWS subscription on the "NewMail" type.
The tool could run as a service on a management server. It would require the Exchange Managed API installed, permissions to access the mailbox, potentially including ApplicationImpersonation on the Exchange Environment. The tool would need to run continuously for this purpose. The benefit of this is that it's just acts as a client.