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• Makes email attachments available to non Windows applications.
• Basis for transferring data between different computer systems.

Grabmail is part of the X-Tranz suite from BAC.

It is a PC based facility, which runs in background, enabling email attachments to be made available to Unix, Linux or DOS applications.

Emails, addressed to specific addresses eg: orders@bacuk.com, are received via your normal POP3 email service eg: MS Exchange.

Grabmail intercepts these and the 'attachments' are copied to an area of your server disc space where your waiting application program (on Unix, Linux or DOS) finds them and updates the server database. Each mail recipient can use a different email server and attachment destination directory if required.

Following processing, details of the email are logged (if logging is specified). Grabmail can be set-up to run automatically at a fixed time interval, which is tailorable via the 'configure' screen.

There are many types of documents that may be received in this way including Purchase Orders or Invoices from you suppliers. Of course, your server applications need to have functions that will import the data received.

Email transactions of this type are likely to replace the more traditional Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) method of transferring transactions between computers.

Extensible Mark-up Language (XML) is a means of defining documents with embedded data and for which standard definitions have been made for most common transaction types e.g. Purchase Orders, Purchase and Sales Invoices etc.

Because of this standard approach, most software package authors are changing their applications so that they can import and export XML documents. The obvious advantage of this approach is that it cuts out the expensive middlemen of EDI, to achieve the same result.

Typical example of Grabmail in use. You receive purchase orders via email (perhaps as XML attachments) and wish to import these into your Unix server based Sales Order Processing system.

Grabmail intercepts relevant emails, from your normal email service, and places the attachments on the server where your own Sales Order import program can deal with them.