Recently I received this question from one of our customers, unfortunately his email address was wrong and I couldn’t reply directly to him. Before leaving to the BizTalk Shipping party … yuuhuuu… I thought to try and provide an answer. See below a scrubbed version of the email I received
I am trying to find someone to help me with few tips related to BizTalk 2006 and POP3 adapter – specifically parsing plain text messages as they are flat files.
We are currently evaluating BizTalk 2006. Parsing of the plain text email messages containing for example orders as the body of the message is one of our tasks.
Do you know of any good resource (blog, samples, …) to recommend.
I already tried community newsgroups but no help there. I would expect that this is rather trivial task with BizTalk 2006.
POP3 adapter has a built-in MIME decoding feature which is enabled by default (“Apply MIME Decoding” property on POP3 receive location property page). So, when POP3 adapter receives a message, it will convert the email body into BizTalk message part. It will save other email headers on the BizTalk message context. You can use Flat-file disassembler component in the receive pipeline and retrieve the actual business data. You can find some basic information on POP3 adapter here: http://www.microsoft.com/biztalk/techinfo/whitepapers/adapterwp.mspx (Open BTS2k6AdapterEnhance.doc)
Here is the online documentation for BizTalk Server 2006.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/bts06default/html/cadd3bdd-f13b-427d-8979-b2541aa5e21d.asp
If there are other questions, please follow up with me and I’ll try to get some answers back to you. Please make sure you fill-in your email address correctly.