I'm confused (nothing new). It appears there is no need for barcoding at all. Instead of a "special email address", you could have "special email addresses" - one for each office. Then you would "scantoemail" distinct packages so that each individual email received is then also a distinct deliverable. A generic script (procmail filter) would take the incoming email, file it away in the filesystem, based on recipient (toplevel directory) and some unique number (or datetime as a subdir - with the actual contents of the directory in the subdir), update the db with the actual filesystem and other meta-data (maybe the scantoemail'ers can put a subject line on the email). Seems pretty basic and rote to me (but boy I'd hate to be the operator).

-derby