E-mail General Attachment Document Stripper (EGADS)

For many knowledge workers, e-mail is still one of (if not the) the primary means of communication. Various document management or knowledge management systems are not natural, don't integrate with work flow.

Within an organization, sending out e-mail after e-mail filled with attachments causes a couple of issues:

burdens the corporate e-mail system
problems with different versions floating around
easy for sensitive material to get passed around
once it leaves the inbox, no idea where the document goes within an organization

EGADS is an idea to address all the afore-mentioned issues. It is a server-side application with hooks into the corporate e-mail system. Much like virus-scanners today (if you consider e-mail processing to be a pipe, EGADS would sit after a virus-scanner; it could also itself have an add-on module that had virus-scanning functionality), EGADS looks at all attachments that pass through the system.

At its most basic, EGADS strips attachments from e-mail messages, places the attachment in a web-accessible location, and ads the URL to the original attachment into an email before sending it on.

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September 29, 2003 - 2:43am — bmann

Beat me to it

I recently found out that MDaemon, a mail server that runs on Windows, has this feature. It's fairly rudimentary, in that you basically specify a directory for the file to go into, and then you have to configure your network shares and/or webserver appropriately to get access to the URL.

July 17, 2003 - 4:47am — bmann

Maybe I need to build this...

Greg was bugging me to build this application when I mentioned it again recently, and said:

This is kinda like a cache. It could have liability issues just like caches. Those may be minimized by making it an intranet function. But then it seems like Outlook file-sharing, a feature few understand and is rarely used.

It's for Intranet use. It can be combined with search, document management, knowledge management, etc. etc. etc. It's likely that it could be launched as a hosted service as well.

Kind of like a multi-user version of Zoe, potentially, where you could click on an owner/author's name and see other public documents, and perhaps at least names/titles of protected documents.

And actually, I know lots of companies that make very vigorous use of Outlook file-sharing/public folders. It is really easy if you have an all Win/EX infrastructure.

I haven't really spec'd it out much other than what I've written on those few pages online. I imagine I could potentially build a rudimentary version at first by setting up a dedicated IMAP/POP3 account -- not an entire mail server. It would, of course, not be as transparent, since you would have to include the address of the mailbox explicitly.

Then, it creates ad-hoc mailing lists with all recipients. Kind of like QuickTopic Pro does with threaded email conversations.