Allow users to upload files to server via email? - email

I am administrating a small, private website with 100% trusted users (about 60 people, i know them all personally).
I am having many problems with the PHP based upload system i have in place currently, mainly with users encountering timeout errors and other varying issues due to the way the upload is handled (not to mention the complete deadzone in the UI created by making the user stare blindly at the page until the upload finishes
Anyways, i have been tossing around alternative forms of file uploading i could offer. FTP accounts were nixed due to the level of tech savvy required. Flash/Java uploaders were nixed because i don't really want proprietary third party applets running on my site.
The other idea i came up with that i think would be perfect would be to offer the ability to EMAIL the files to the server. Emailing attachments is a simple enough task, and better yet it provides the user with some tangible feedback to the uploading process.
My question is, how could i go about implementing such a system?
The server is running Gentoo Linux with Apache and i have full root access. Mail dameons can be installed to my needs.
If you have a better way to upload files, perhaps you could offer that instead?

Stick with PHP. It's certainly not perfect but the problems you're describing can probably be handled. max-execution-time and upload_max_filesize are configurable values. I would at least try tweaking those numbers (no php code changes required) before trying to implement an email based solution.

There are several file upload libraries with progress bars using pure javascript. Keep it in PHP.

Related

How to tell Google (Cyren) Antivirus that it Incorrectly detected as malware/malicious my software?

All of a sudden Google started to say my application is a virus. Does anyone know the best way to reach out to them and to have a "closer" look? Microsoft has a SmartScreen submission page where you can upload your application and ask them to review it, and it works great & fast...
Every single antivrus other than Google's Cyren says my application is safe, including: AVG, ESET-NOD32, Mailware Bytes, McAfee, Symantec, Webroot, BitDefender, and etc... (I just listed the "famous" ones)
Cyren currently does have a way to submit such samples. They accept submissions via E-mail (with zipped and password-protected attachment), and via FTP.
For details, please see: https://www.cyren.com/support/reporting-av-misclassifications
Please note that Cyren is not owned by Google, and VirusTotal is in fact listing it as a separate positive result. I was unable to find what Google product is used. My best guess would be Google's SafeBrowsing.

What is the best way to programmatically extract text from an email from a additional inbox?

I recently started working at an IT company as a support agent and one of the things we do is managing the backup of our clients' servers.
It's all working nicely, but one part is just terrible, which is the backup log. The backup log is a excel file with a list of all the clients and for each of them a list of dates and whether or not the backup has succeeded on that date. The data in that document comes from emails rapports that are automatically sent when the backup finishes.
But here comes the bad part: Once in a week there is an employee who checks ALL THE EMAILS and manually fills the backup log. This was too much for me, especially knowing that we only have about 5 employees.
Solution: Make a script that does it for you. Yeah, I know and I think I'm capable of doing that, but there's a few things that I'm not sure about and I hope you guys could help me with it:
The mails are all in a different folders in an inbox that I had to add to my outlook manually and I don't know how I can programmatically reach it.
I don't know in what language I should use for this. I'm able to do it in a lot of languages, but I don't know which one suits this best
These are the only two things that I don't know and I would really appreciate it if you could help me with this.
EDIT:
The server is an exchange server with IMAP enabled. I eat java for breakfast and I've used JavaMail before, so I think I'll go with that, thanks
This is a pretty open-ended question....
You should pick a language that you're comfortable with and that has a good email support library, e.g., JavaMail for Java.
If the messages are in an Exchange server that has enabled IMAP support, you should be able to read the messages using JavaMail or any other library that support IMAP. If the server only supports the Microsoft proprietary protocol, you have fewer choices.
We really need to know more about the mail server you're using to offer much more guidance.

sending files from iphone app to a local server?

Need some help please with web related matters since I don't know much about web (more on the software side of things).
Basically, I am developing an iphone app and would like to send data to a local server once in a while (for simplicity, let's just say I want to send this info to my personal computer which will act as the server). This is just some simple data, and I dont care about the format (actually .txt is the best, but I am open to any format which will make it easier - I am just transferring numbers).
What would be the best way to go about this process? A quick step by step explanation would be highly appreciated. From my very basic knowledge I assume that I will need to:
setup my Mac as a server (which I think should be done from settings?)
Create a URL connection on my app and send the file?
I am probably missing 50 other steps here...
Thanks!
One path is to set up a webDAV server -- you'll have to Google that up, it's far too big a topic to cover here.
To the specific questions you asked:
1) Your mac can become a web server by turning on the WebSharing in preferences, or a file server by turing on fileSharing. Be sure to set permissions the way you want them.
2) If your mac is a web server, you could write a simple CGI script (perl, ruby, or the like -- this is simple tutorial stuff that's all over the www) that accepts your text as a parameter. From your iPhone app, you'd make an NSURLRequest to a URL similar to:
http://192.168.10.1/webPage.html?this+is+the+text+I+want+to+send
Of course, you can get fancier ans use POST requests (the above example is a GET request), but that's going to require more reading.
If you want to transfer files via file sharing, that's a bit more complicted.
What would REALLY help us answer is if you could specify the question a bit more tightly. As it is, you've asked about a very broad area that covers quite a bit of ground.

Solutions for allowing users to submit large files (1 - 5 GB). Thoughts?

My customer has a need to be able to receive large video files his site members(1 - 5 GB, maybe larger if possible). Hopefully I can get some good ideas from the overflow community on this
My origonal thoughts are to some how set up a file send site where only members can log in and e-mail their video's in. Would this be tough to create? Perhaps there are already some services out there that would authenticate my user's and allow them to email large files(The cost maybe worth it).
Would some sort of FTP Solution also be an available option? I would have to know which user is uploading files. I've never done an FTP upload site before.
Any thought or helpful links would be great! Thanks!
One option would be to build some kind of client side uploader which would allow you to measure progress, resume uploads etc
Possible technologies could include Silverlight, Java Applet or Flash
See silverlight example on codeplex

First web server questions

Just looking for some help/suggestions with this. I require my own server for an upcoming project that will be hosting users websites. I want to build a control panel the user can log into and modify their website which will be stored elsewhere on the server. This all seems easy enough, It's just managing domains and emails that confuse me.
What should I look for to manage domain names and point them to the correct website and also what would be the best way to manage email accounts/set up new ones etc. I want to avoid cPanel/WHM if possible, I'm looking to control most things through the control panel I will be building. So any suggestions on this would be useful as well, as I will be wanting to add email accounts through php (Can be done using a shell I assume?).
I will also be wanting to measure bandwidth used on the websites contained in each users directory, any suggestions on making this possible?
I'm really looking for some suggestions on what software to use to set this up, any advice would be really helpful!
Thanks,
Graeme
It sounds like you've got a lot of creative room. May I suggest a web framework? Django. With it you can build out a nice control panel, it's template system is clean and concise. It's also based on Python and thats why I suggest it. If there is a python module for it, you can use it in Django... so things like altering, creating, etc. local data/files is a breeze. you simply us Python (you can even forget it's "django"), crunch your data and then spit it out (into django... out to templates.. to display to the user).
You'll likely want AJAXY biznazz, their is a nice Django App for that, Dajax. Django has a rich and helpful community and tons of resources. Just hop on GitHub.com and search for Django, You'll find tons of stuff.
Im building a DNS Control Panel with it. Which sounds like a minimal version of what you're doing.