[SalesForce] the attachements

Some email clients, unfortunately, will embed your signature's images/icons as attachments in the outgoing emails (MIME format). A proper web email client (e.g. gmail) will automatically host the images for you and then generate HTML markup for the signature that only references the hosted image, for example:

'-- Bill Lumberg <img src="/gmail/images/Initech.jpeg">' 

^^ then, you don't get all those garbage attachments. So, this is dependent on the email client of the sender.

If you're writing an Apex InboundEmailHandler, you can "kind of" detect the presence of these nasty embedded attachments by searching for a "cid:" (read: content id) in the email's HTML body. Unfortunately, last I checked, even the InboundEmailHandler does not provide the information necessary to determine exactly which attachments correspond to each of the embedded cid's (i.e. you can't differentiate between the "real" attachments and the embedded ones). What I ended up doing, in my InboundEmailHandler, was to check for the presence of "cid:" in the HTML body, and if detected then I apply a simple size-threshold filter (configurable) to all attachments matching an MIME image content-type (e.g. remove all things that look like images smaller than 8K).

Unfortunately, I'm not sure if you'll have any good options outside of an InboundEmailHandler -- or better yet, have users either send in emails via gmail or eliminate their gaudy signatures ;)

1) Can we bulk-upload these PDFs to Salesforce and associate them with the particular student record? For example, can John Doe Grade Report.pdf get attached to John Doe's record, Jane Doe Grade Report.pdf get attached to Jane Doe's record, etc.

YES - You can use Data Loader to upload attachments to Salesforce. Before uploading attachments, note the following:

If you intend to upload via the Bulk API, verify that Upload Bulk API Batch as Zip File on the Settings | Settings page is enabled.

To upload attachments: Confirm that the CSV file you intend to use for attachment importing contains the following required columns (each column represents a Salesforce field): 1. ParentId - the Salesforce ID of the parent record. This will be Salesforce ID of a Student Record. 2. Name - the name of the attachment file, such as testPDF.pdf. 3. Body - the absolute path to the attachment on your local drive. Ensure that the values in the Body column contain the full file name of the attachments as they exist on your computer. For example, if an attachment named testPDF.pdf is located on your computer at C:\Export, Body must specify C:\Export\testPDF.pdf.

2) Can we write a mass-email that pulls in these reports as an attachment. It would look something like this, ideally:

YES- This will involve a apex code.

1. If you want to send an email to a Student when attachment is inserted into SFDC then you need to write a trigger code. Trigger code can contain a logic to send an email to Student Record.
2. The another possible solution will be to write a Batch apex class, which will run on a daily basis. It will identify all the attachments which are uploaded on that day, It will find out the associated students and send email to those student records along with their PDF as an attachment.