I'm wondering if it would be possible to send an email from a lua script. I am using linux so I do have the mail command, but I can't work out how to use it.
Any help would be much appreciated.
LuaSocket offers support for sending email:
http://w3.impa.br/~diego/software/luasocket/smtp.html
You've probably already found a solution, but since this question still shows up in google, here's another answer that works on linux:
mail = io.popen("mail -s 'SUBJECT' user#example.com", "w")
mail:write("testing some stuff\n\4")
-- tested with lua 5.2 on ubuntu server
io.popen opens the mail program as a file as explained in the lua reference manual.
It is important to open it in writing mode ("w") to be able to actually write the body of the email.
Then you just write your message with :write and when you're done, append a newline character "\n" followed by a EOT "\4" character to tell the program to send the message.
This method has the advantage that you do not need to handle the sending of the message yourself, as with the LuaSocket library and that you don't need to have SMTP support on your mail server enabled, which can be a lot of work to set up propperly and the disadvantage that you need to have access to mailx, so you can't send messages from anywhere.
Hope this helps :)
Related
I need to send an email that contains html in a perl CGI script without using sendmail. Is there a easy way to do this?
The synopsis of Email::Sender shows how to send mail directly via SMTP.
You must send HTML code? The standard Perl distribution comes with Net::SMTP which implements the SMTP protocol directly in Perl. This means you can send mail on systems that don't have the sendmail or mail commands implemented, or sendmail installed. I've used it for years without too many issues.
If you can download Perl modules, you should look at Email::MIME. That allows you to send out MIME multipart email, and doesn't depend upon Sendmail. I haven't used this one all that much, but it isn't that difficult to use.
There are many many modules on the CPAN that will do mail sending for you. http://search.cpan.org/
I'm working on an issue tracking system and would like the application to handle email replies. That is, I would like a script that can monitor an email queue and perform some action based on the email contents. It should then be able to delete the email, etc.
I currently use MIME::Lite to send email, and I can handle writing the script etc. (read: I'm not new to Perl). However, I have no idea what modules are good for doing this particular task. I'd like to get started on this as quickly as possible so I hope to narrow my search space for possible modules.
In case you need to know, the application will be running on a standard linux, Perl, MySQL stack with Exchange as the mail server.
Can anyone suggest a Perl module to help me out? Any tutorials or best practices related to this would also be helpful.
Thanks!
Do you have access to the Exchange server via IMAP or WebDAV?
For IMAP:
Mail::IMAPClient
IMAP::Client
Net::IMAP::Client
Email::Folder::IMAP
For WebDAV:
Email::Folder::Exchange
POP3 would also be an option if it's enabled on the server. IMAP is probably the way to go if you've got it.
I've done something similar using Mail::POP3Client
The Perl Email Project # http://emailproject.perl.org/mediawiki/index.php/Main_Page has recommendations and other information on the mail oriented modules for perl.
I want to send out one off emails from a linux server. The server does not need to receive emails back.
Is there a simpler solution than sendmail for sending outgoing emails only?
I would prefer to use Perl to send the email.
Calling out to /usr/lib/sendmail is usually the preferred method because it handles delivery problems correctly. This does not mean using sendmail. Most (all?) mail transport system provide a command that's just named sendmail and provides an interface compatible to the original.
Alternatively you can send directly through a SMTP relay using a package like Net::SMTP but be extra sure to correctly cater for delivery problems.
Sendmail is not the only choice. you can use Postfix, Qmail, and many others
my Perl scripts call the mailx command. to know how to use it, type 'man mailx'
However this require to have a MTA correclty configured.
Or you can just use the Net::SMTP perl library and use your smtp server of choice
I have used msmtp successfully, ie it supports great authentication
TJ Luoma did a nice writeup of it on TUAW
I find nullmailer a very useful solution for the described scenario. Nullmailer is a sendmail/qmail/etc replacement MTA which relays to a fixed set of mail servers. It is very simple to configure and consumes little resources.
One important advantage of nullmailer over other mentioned solutions like mstmp and ssmtp is that it maintains a queue of emails to be sent. The application sending the mail is blocked only a very short time while the mail is queued (milliseconds). The sending of the mail happens in the context of a another process.
Solutions like mstmp and ssmtp don't maintain a queue of email. The sending happens in the context of the application, thereby blocking the application. Sending an email this way can easily take 1 to 2 seconds or longer. This may not be a problem in many cases but can become a problem if the email is sent by a web application.
http://untroubled.org/nullmailer/
You do not need a mail transport agent (MTA) instance on the machine doing the sending if you have another mailserver already running in your organization: you can make Perl deliver the email through SMTP to that server, so there's no need for having (another) MTA like sendmail on "your" machine.
I'm fond of creating a gmail or other free account and then using the java mail api in J2EE to send messages (from your new gmail account) to whoever... Typically i'll create a Mailer class which can be constructed with a default constructor and then give it a send(String dest, String subj, String body[, Obj attach...if you want]) and then in your case you might wrap the thing in a main method so that you can call it from else with some command line args, or call from within some java program. If you interested i'll shoot you the code.
I know you said perl, but the simplest cross-platform email sending library I have used is python's smtplib. Certainly worth a look.
My university refused to allow us to access out mail via POP or IMAP etc so I want to write a GTK based C app that sits in my notifcation area and does the job of a mail client notifier. Because I can't use anything like POP or IMAP, what would be a good way to do it? I guess I could scrape the HTML and look for a tag that is only present in unread mail or something?
Any Ideas?
I know you said C/GTK but it's a piece of cake in Python/GTK with urllib2, libcookie, and BeautifulSoup. That way you don't have to deal with raw sockets, and parsing the HTML yourself. Hell if you edit your question with a link to the source I could hack this up for you in no time. But if you're doing this as a socket exercise, more power to you :P
You should note that most server admins don't take too kindly too frequent scraping of their site, and you should probably clear it with them, lest you face the repercussions.
Well yes, if the only way to access your email is through webmail then any tool you create will have to use the webmail markup to work out new messages.
Personally I'd try and find out why POP/IMAP isn't allowed. As far as I'm concerned that's a really strange policy.
In precedent job, the only access we had to email was through a webmail (squirrelmail) at the time, I had wrote a Perl script with WWW::Mechanize that went through the pages to fetch the emails, send them via smtp to an external mailbox, delete them, and expunge the trash...
It's was about 20/25 lines of code. Off course, a C version would be a bit bigger because it would not have WWW::Mechanize :-)
I am writing a program that will be emailing reports out many (~100) clients which I want to test before I spam everyone.
I want to do a test run against my production data and actually send the messages to a SMTP server, but I don't want the SMTP server to actually deliver the messages. I want the server to act like a real SMTP server from the perspective of my application, but instead of delivering messages, I just want it to store the messages, and log what happened.
Is there a SMTP server specifically designed for testing purposes?
Does anyone know of a way to configure exim or postfix to behave like I have described above
What do you use to test a mass-email delivery?
In java you can use dumbster
Its easy to use and you can validate every aspect of the email you are intercepting.
It's a Java SMTP server implementation meant for unit testing. (Just make sure you redirect your email to the machine running dumbster...)
I just found another alternative that do almost the same: Greenmail
Greenmail also support POP3, IMAP with SSL so you can test your client against it.
For .NET I set the config file to deliver mail to a folder, then you can have the automated test inspect the directory and files.
<system.net>
<mailSettings>
<smtp deliveryMethod="SpecifiedPickupDirectory">
<specifiedPickupDirectory pickupDirectoryLocation="c:\pickupDirectory"/>
</smtp>
</mailSettings>
</system.net>
While searching for options I found the following that may be useful.
DevNullSmtp
Use a null SMTP server for testing
Fake SMTP Service
twisted examples/emailserver.tac
"The Wiser framework for unit testing mail"
I've heard of a few other developers moving from Dumbster to Wiser and have migrated my testing code as well. One of the Java components that I've worked on sends thousands of emails a day and I've written unit tests for the different email templates and scenarios using Dumbster and Wiser. I prefer Wiser.
Snips from the Wiser website (http://code.google.com/p/subethasmtp/wiki/Wiser):
Wiser is a smart replacement for Dumbster and is built on top of the SubEtha SMTP Java library which allows your Java application to receive SMTP mail with a simple, easy-to-understand API.
A good program for email testing is smtp4dev (Windows only).
It's a dummy SMTP server. Sits in the system tray and does not deliver the received messages. The received messages can be quickly viewed, saved and the source/structure inspected.
http://smtp4dev.codeplex.com/
http://skaraarslan.blogspot.com/2008/02/how-to-check-email-works-without-using.html
(this presumes you are using .net to send emails)
Given that you mention exim and postfix (which I'm taking to be some kind of unix stuff), this answer might not be as useful as it could be, but check out Neptune. It's a fake SMTP server designed for automated testing. If you've got a spare windows box floating around, you could put Neptune on that then configure your app to send "through" the Neptune server.
Exim can be configured to accept incoming mails but not deliver them. Look for the keywords queue_only and queue_only_file in the documentation.
I personally modify the e-mail addresses to test, I send them to a dummy account of mine, that way I can validate not only that they sent, but that they appear in the proper format.
At my office, we have a server that is set up to always send all incoming mail to one address, regardless of who it's actually addressed to. We just point all our testing environments at that server and watch the QA mailbox fill up. I don't know what server it is, but it's probably some open source thing someone found.
Sendmail has a Test Mode.
You just invoke sendmail with the -bt parameter. As an example:
/usr/lib/sendmail -bt -Ciu-testconfiguration.cf
Please be aware that in this method, Sendmail requires an special configuration on rewrite rules. You need to understand how Sendmail rewrites addresses in order to properly create a .cf file for Test Mode.
Edit: See this article: http://ussg.iu.edu/usail/mail/debugging/
After not beeing happy with the solutions I found, I ended up writing developmentSMTP, easy to use, 100% Java --> cross platform.
Supports writing emails to file, forwarding emails or simply printing them on stdout.
Post Hoc is a pure Java application that looks exactly like an SMTP server to the application you are testing, but it simply collects all the email messages and allows you to inspect them using a web interface.
Freely available at: Post Hoc GitHub Site
For more information: PostHoc: Testing Apps that Send Email
If you're looking to manually test that the email sends and that the email template has the right kind of html and css that you're expecting, then I would recommend maildev https://www.npmjs.com/package/maildev. You can install and run it as a node module and also as a docker container! I've found it extremely handy for basic sanity testing of emails.