This is a theoretical question but any specific technical knowledge that could help will also be appreciated.
I am an IT Assistant with not much knowledge in programming (apart from EasyPattern and super-simple batch files) but have been given an opportunity to start getting into it by having been given a task to create a step in our document management system which is vaguely defined by the title of this question - An automated email response system to incoming faxes.

CONTEXT:
So, we have incoming faxes with short digit codes on them, these code correlate to identifying information in our database (relevantly; email addresses). In a watched folder environment we have software that upon auto-acknowledging these fax/image files being dropped into a designated incoming location (from a fax server) it initiates Microsoft Digital Imaging (MODI, runs in the background) to find these codes (using OCR, Optical Character Recognition) and places them into CSV files (one .csv file per code per fax page). Our database admin assures me that he can have the email addresses that correlate to the codes automatically placed into their correlating csv file.

GOAL:
It is from this point that I am being asked to find a way to have a universal unchanging email message ("We have received your fax") automatically sent to those email addresses. Upon a "way" being known, I am then to actually accomplish it.

QUESTION:
How to do this? As I said, a valid theoretical answer will suffice, for that will tell me how it can be done, which would in turn tell me what to learn, which would in turn tell me where to look.

WHERE I'M AT NOW:
I understand VBA to be a programming model within an 'event-driven' paradigm and that VBA programming projects are possible and supported in both Microsoft Outlook and Access. Does herein lie my answer? Can VBA used to accomplish this? (maybe auto import the email addresses from the csv file into the "To:" field of a outgoing email?) I'm hoping it'll be easier since the message can always stay the same (something along the lines of: We received your message). I'm reading two text books that introduce the reader to VBA in Access with one, and VBA in Outlook with the other.

I hope this message makes sense, this whole question might be naive, incoherent, or maybe even outright ignorant. But any patient and understanding response would be GREATLY appreciated.

I would not recommend VBA. I suggest vb.net. Before I retired I would have just written this up in vbScript with one entry per email written to a log file as

2013-12-09 13:49:27 confirmation sent to <email address>

But you would probably find vb.net with a folder watch component easier. You could then write to a log file as well as a listbox or textbox control for visual feedback.

This is a programming question so I am moving it to the programming thread.

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