Piping emails to a backend webmail system

I've seen various helpdesk programs pipe support emails into their ticket system and it has made me wonder whether the following system would be possible;

We would like to implement a similar email piping system for various team members in our company so that they all enter a backend email system which is set up like webmail (with WYSIWYG editors etc). The key functionality we would like to introduce is the option of allowing certain email addresses to be accessed by other team members if they are off sick, out of the office, leave the company etc.

We can then also develop further functionality to process orders sent by customers such as snipping attachments to create orders etc.

So, the questions I would like to ask about the possibility of the above requirement is;

- How would we go about piping emails to extract all the information sent?
- Are there any open source programs already out there which we would be able to modify?
- If there is an alternative solution to what I've described above I'd be happy to consider it.


Thanks in advance for your responses. :)

are you running exchange?

if so you can grant access to other users

then they can open your emails in their outlook,


go to file>open and "other users folder"

You can pipe emails under linux so if you're wanting to do that then your first port of call is to look at a linux platform. Windows doesn't support this - instead you need to write your own Win32 SMTP server that will accept the incoming emails and POST them to a php script. I am currently developing this myself - it's not finished yet however you're more than welcome to try a early beta version if you like to see if it meets your needs and we can discuss it from there.

No idea about open source email platforms, I found a pretty decent one on hotscripts years ago but can't remember its name.