I have a public folder that was used for the wrong reason. Due to some regulations we had to store lots of photos, we're talking at least 7000 photos that are stored based on a location of stores. So for example, each store would send in an email with at least 2 photos of their location, that email would contain their location name or number, and those photos, so there was some sort of organization for it.
I would love to move the contents of that public folder to a normal windows folder we could share on a server. Is anything like that possible? Anybody have other ideas?
Just a suggestion having gone from an Exchange 2003 to Office 365 environment they suggest moving Public Folders to a SharePoint list. With photos SharePoint may offer some benefit in the sense that you can store extended amounts of metadata against each picture as well as indexing and search capabilities. Essentially mailboxes were setup to receive the e-mails and then a script or process was run to take the e-mail and move it to a SP list.
Alternatively, file storage sounds pretty good as well since there really are no other storage options for these types of things.
Regardless, I would check out MessageOps.com for some cool tools and ideas in this regard.
Yes, you should be able to script a rule on that folder to automatically save attachments that come in to the folder. Otherwise, you'd have to have someone manually save each attachment.
I haven't personally done this but the following StackOverflow question might point you in the right direction for the VBA coding:
Rule to save attachments on incoming emails not working
Although, Public Folders are extremely outdated and aren't likely to be kept around in the coming iterations of Exchange. I would suggest moving away to something else like a resource mailbox or Sharepoint.