Mailbox watcher as trigger (FME Server Automations)

Would an Email Trigger followed by a Filter Action not accomplish the same thing?

@dbaldacchino - As per the suggestion by @david_r above, have you had the opportunity to test out FME Server 2019.0 and the new Automations feature?

I'd be curious if you might have any comments on how to make that process more efficient for you, if it does not meet the needs here. I am not familiar with Microsoft Flow, so perhaps there are more complex queries performed on incoming emails.

Hi @rylanatsafe, yes I have played around a bit already. What I mean is an email trigger that can monitor a specified mailbox (Office 365, Gmail, etc.) and based on email rules, determine whether or not to trigger an automation. If an FME Server is behind a firewall and is not public, you cannot set it up to receive SMTP or IMAP email. At least it is difficult to set up from what I understand because only specific emails would need to be routed to it (ex. for company.com domain, you might set up an fme.company.com subdomain to route emails to your FME server, but routing becomes very complicated to accomplish). So the current email trigger cannot be used in my situation since the server is not public-facing. It might work on an instance of FME Cloud perhaps, but I have not tried and in most cases FME Cloud won't work because I need access to data behind the company firewall.

Thanks for your comment @david_r, sorry I missed it. Please see my other response (above?) for the reason behind my request/idea and why I don't think your suggestion is an "equal" solution.

Example of Flow mentioned in original idea

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Thanks for the additional information @dbaldacchino! Definitely helps me understand a bit more.

The IMAP Email Publication is a polling approach, rather than directly receiving like the SMTP Publication, but it effectively checks all email instead of only a subset as defined by a filter.

Would it be possible to setup your Microsoft Flow, leveraging its additional filter logic, to forward to an email that is dedicated for FME Server to poll through the IMAP Publication? Yes, that would require security rules that allow FME Server to fetch data – but FME Server wouldn't have to be public-facing.

Additional note that reviewing documentation we are not providing distinction between the two Publication types as effectively as we could...

Thanks @rylanatsafe. IMAP would probably be easier to set up on FME Server, however from what I understand and through thinking how I'd use it, it seems a bit limiting compared to SMTP email. With SMTP, you could think of the email itself as a command (ex: deletedatabase@fme.company.com, createproject@fme.company.com etc.). So you would be able to create workspaces that process specific emails that come in. Unfortunately I am not able to validate this as I cannot set up our private server to receive email to test these concepts. Hence my posted idea to make it simpler, per the Microsoft example.

I might eventually try the IMAP email as trigger so we shall see. I would really like to see some more recent and updated examples on how to use emails as triggers. Perhaps an upcoming webcast on FME Server 2019 Automations? ;)

Yes! An excellent plug for the UPCOMING WEBINAR ON MAY 30TH!

*And thank you, again, for the extended context. It's really helpful anytime we can increase of understanding of use-cases!