Processing of Inbound email updates that do not have the keyword in the email subject line

Dear All

I have an issue with email updates on calls and wondered if anyone has done any processing on mail arriving in a Inbound Mail monitored inbox prior to pulling it into Service Desk via the Inbound Mail Service? My problem is this. I would like to use a support provider's email to update the relevant incident when they send to a specific mailbox

Here are the non negotiables:

1) I have no control over a email format that is sent from a support provider

2) I already use the inbound mail service with a particular keyword that doesn't appear in the support email but does in all our notifications

3) The support email has our call reference number in the body with a prefix from the support provider that doesn't appear in our notifications

I can only think of 4 options to achieve this and the first 2 don't really involve Service Desk to any great degree:

1) Use some form of extended Inbox rules (Outlook with Exchange) to apply to that support provider's email that will search the body of the of the email text for the call number, copy it and paste it into the subject line along with the 'update' keyword and forward it on to the monitored inbound mailbox. I can't see a way to make inbox rules do a search and edit though unless there is some form of custom script that you can embed in an Outlook rule maybe?

2) use an exchange transport rule to do the mail processing before (still researching this one)

Service Desk only options:

3) search the body of the email for the different 'update' keyword and set up a seprate InboundMail service on the application server that would deal with it. Not a Service Desk feature as far as i'm aware

4) Allow Service Desk to log a call with the support provider's email and then do some processing with a calculation (finds the call reference bit of the original email and stores it in an attribute) The process will then send a notification with the information on the original email to the InboundMail monitored mailbox with a correctly configured notification with the 'update' keyword in the subject along with the extracted incident reference number and then close the original incident down (not ideal as it created another incident and messes about with call volumes)

I appreciate that some of these aren't purely Service Desk solutions but hopefully someone has seen something similar

Thanks in advance

Jason

7.6