Script will check/receive email for classified ad posting confirmations and replies. The confirmation emails will be from a known sender have a URL in the body of the email that has a unique posting id number as well other other information pertaining to city, sub-city and category. That information will be extracted/parsed and go into a database. Reply emails will contain the unique id number in the headers, usually in the "to" or "cc" fields. Whenever a reply email is received, the script will cross-reference the unique post id number in the database, and redirect the email to a pre-assigned email address based on the city and category of the post.

For example, an ad posting confirmation is received with a URL in the body that indicates a post id of 123456, with a city of Sometown and a category of Boats. A reply email is received that has 123456 in the "to" field, so the script redirects the email to the address which is assigned to Sometown Boats.

While not common, if email replies are received for which there is no match in the database, these will be stored for manual assignment. For example, if ad replies are received indicating a post id of 34567 in the "to" field, but no ad confirmation for 34567 has been received, there will be a holding area where we manually assign a city/category for 34567, and the held emails will subsequently get redirected, as well as future emails which reference that same post id.

Regarding the term "redirect" we intend that the original "from" and "to" addresses will stay intact, similar to how gmail does automatic forwarding, for example.

The database will retain information on all of the emails it has processed, so that statistics may be analyzed such as the number of ads that have been posted during a selected timeframe, the number of replies processed for each ad, the number of replies for each city, or the number of replies for each category etc.