[Mimedefang] OT: Capturing emails from IMAP folders

[Nigel Allen]

Apologies for the OT post but the people here seem to be pretty 
knowledgeable.

We are currently modifying an email system for a customer and have got a 
little stumped at their latest request.

Basically what happens now (paraphrasing) is that a customer service rep 
receives an email from a customer. We have put a plugin into Thunderbird 
that, when the "send" button is pressed, prompts the rep for a customer 
number. That number is embedded into an X-header in the email. At this 
point on the linux server, mimedefang looks into the email and if it 
finds the header, it validates the customer code that has been entered. 
If it is a valid customer number, mimedefang tells sendmail to send a 
copy to "customers" (a large email account with hundreds of folders). 
When the copy arrives in "customers", procmail grabs the header value 
and "files" away the email into the correct subfolder.

The problem is that the original email is still sitting in the rep's inbox.

What the customer has asked for now is for "something" that will grab 
the original email from the rep's inbox and "file" that in the correct 
place with the response automagically.

The only identifier which is common across the emails that I can think 
of using would be the "in-reply-to" header.

Does anyone have any thoughts of how on earth we could comb through the 
user's inbox in real-time and achieve this?

TIA

Nigel