How to organize a budget electronic journal of incoming / outgoing correspondence?

Question

Bots

In our public organization, office work is carried out in paper form, and after the arrival of quarantine, we faced a problem - physical access to the state. the authorities closed and the appeal / receipt of services switched to an online format.

But this turned out to be a big plus rather than a minus, since now you can automate half of the work (for example, the same type of mail notifications from government agencies).

The budget is close to zero, because management (older and not very tech-savvy) is afraid to miss something and trusts only papers.

Employees are tired of bureaucracy and want to somehow alleviate their lot.

Therefore, ready-made solutions (often cumbersome) disappear (but not far, the implementation will be phased).

I think we must first make a banal electronic registration of incoming / outgoing correspondence.

To do this, we raise a telegram bot that receives the following data from employees:
where or from where the letter is sent / received (appeal, application, etc.), a brief description, internal case number, tracking identifier (coupon, track code, outgoing incoming number letters).

I don't think that a page with forms is needed here, and therefore telegram messages will successfully replace them (simple division by line breaks).

The bot registers in the database and issues a number.

Now we need a script to process the text of notifications from the state. bodies, the script must process them and transfer them for registration in the database (I think you can’t do without raising the mail server here).

Another script will keep track of dates and deadlines and send notifications to employees via telegram.

And other scripts for compiling documents according to templates, for parsing information where there are no notifications from the state. authorities or they do not come to the post office, etc.

And a modest admin panel to manage it.

If anyone has experience or recommendations (especially free python libraries), suggestions (commercial ones are also possible), I will be glad to see them in the answers.

Answer 1

You don't need any mail server, telegram bot, etc. Do everything on Google Docs. A table with data (incoming/outgoing/responsible/approval/closing), as the front of a Google form or Google Web App, redirect emails to the address on Google Mail and pull them into the database automatically with a script (thanks to Google App Script, this is just a ZhabaScript with connected branded libs ). For an average office worker, this will be much clearer, and for an IT specialist, there will be no need to administer, deploy, etc. something.

Answer 2

1) Unfortunately, you can’t do without a page with validation (!!!) of the data. You can’t even imagine how many mistakes will be made when entering information, how much will be confused and confused, how much incorrect information your bot will have to digest.
2) Raising a mail server is a very, very bad idea, ranging from spam to informal exchange of information in the body of the letter. Here you will also be surprised that often this is not quite text, but at best html, at worst - encoded in some fucking Base64 encoding ...
3) Doing an exchange with government agencies via e-mail is even worse, because everything in paragraph 2) plus in the body of the letter the answer is in the attached doc-file.
In total, the best thing is to install a sufficiently powerful system in which to conduct INTERNAL workflow. But there will be an INTRODUCTION stage, at which you will most likely be sent.
The best option is if your government agencies have external APIs to their systems in the form of JSON/XML requests....