I'm trying to write something that puts the contents of the message on a queue, to have work done on it later. I've been messing around with IMAP IDLE with varying degrees of success.
I was wondering if anyone knows of a method to have a mail server receive an email, and then perform an action like posting the contents of the email to a URL endpoint.
Any ideas? Thanks!
Try fetchmail and procmail. You periodically poll the mail server (every minute if necessary) and use fetchmail to download from the IMAP server. Set up a procmail rule to run your notifier application on emails that match your selection criteria.
Any of the scripting languages (perl, python, tcl/tk etc.) have good, mature and easy to use email handler libraries (in fact you can get this sort of thing for most lanaguages), so it should be quite straightforward to write the handler in one of those.
Configure the SMTP (mail transport) server to deliver the mail to an application that performs the desired action. Don't do it on the IMAP (mailbox client) level if you can avoid it.
Related
Was hoping for some ideas as to a service to which I can set up an inbound-only email system. In other words, I will have multiple users on the system, each can receive their own email... but at the moment... at this time, I am not focused on the ability to send or reply to messages, only receive them and send to the appropriate user. I looked into Postmark... They seem to have some great functionality.
CloudMailin Is another alternative. However there are effectively three options for setting up something like this.
Use an existing, traditional, email server and poll for the emails
Setup your own email server and create a script to run when you receive an email
Use a third party solution, as you've already mentioned.
I went through for of these for Rails a little while back here, but all the information is still relevant.
Let's suppose I have created an IMAP client and I want to create a filter that, say, deletes messages that have certain characteristics.
I can make this a startup task that happens whenever the client is opened, but the problen is that a user might view the inbox in a different client and the filter won't get rid of the unwanted messages before the inbox is viewed.
Is there some way to tell the server to call my service every time it receives a message so the unwanted messages can go away once the server receives them instead of once a client is opened? Is this even possible with IMAP? If not, is there a different well supported e-mail technology that allows this sort of interaction?
You can do server-side email filtering with the Sieve Email Filtering Language and the ManageSieve Protocol. There is good support in open-source software. However, I am only aware of a few major email providers, that support it. If it is supported, it is usually accessible on the IMAP host and with the IMAP account credentials, i.e. you can test it by connecting to TCP port 2000 and 4190.
See the following three links for more information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sieve_%28mail_filtering_language%29
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5228 (Sieve: An Email Filtering Language)
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5804 (ManageSieve Protocol)
Sieve also supports a few notifications types. If the filtering language is not powerful enough to for your purposes, you can send notifications for all incoming emails, wake up the IMAP client, and let the client to the filtering.
I'm sending newsletter using Zend Mail. I have used setReturnPath() to put all undelivered mail notifications in one place.
And what now?
How to get the list of addresses which were unreachable?
How do I read and parse the returned notifications?
How to know whether the mail returned because of non existing email or just quota exceeded?
Which headers do I need to send and check?
Related:
Variable Envelope Return Pathwiki
Handling undelivered emails in web appso
This class may be helpful. Can determine whether the mail is a bounce and return a response code with description:
http://www.phpclasses.org/package/2691-PHP-Parse-bounced-e-mail-message-reports.html
Short Answer:
you can't do that in a simple way and not in your app.
Long Answer:
You should handle that in asynchronous way and outside your php app (at least in part). First of all you must setup the return address to something like sender+recipient=recipientdomain.com#senderdomain.com as in the TimB answer. At this point all the notification sent by receiving smtp server will go to that address.
Then you need to setup the smtp daemon at senderdomain.com mail exchanger to handle that kind of bounce messages and process them in some sort of pipe.
With a pipe you can forward the returned message to an external program which parse the message and extract the needed informations (i.e. the reason why the delivery is failed)
At that point in your program (which can be a cli script in your application) you can mark the address as failing and optionally can record why.
This is a pretty difficult task, which can't be handled in a simple application. Usually I use a dedicated software for large mailing list handling such as sympa which takes care of this task for you.
Otherwise you can use an external delivery service such as Sendgrid which will do the dirty job for you and report the failing addresses with a simple API. As a bonus with this solution, they are in the whitelists for all the major providers, so your email won't be marked as spam as far as you respect some simple rules (i.e. removing bouncing addresses and use an opt-in policy for your newsletter)
Well, the second link and especially the answer by TimB explains very well the procedure.
What may not be clear is that the return path is nothing other than a regular email account, i.e. you will get the email to that address. Zend_Mail is not waiting for a response and hence there is no list of addresses.
I am trying to have a kind of observer pattern in ColdFusion
We want to listen to the incoming Email messages and act on them. Scenario is something like this :
Application sends email to the helpdesk system
Helpdesk system automatically generates a ticket and responds with an email to the email address of the application
The application's email is configured in the Lotus notes
Now the application should listen to this incoming email message, decode that and update the coressponding ticketid
I see there is a possibility with Event Gateways, but I am unable to realize the whole picture.
Thoughts or suggestions?
One way is to setup an email server with IMAP support, and use some sort of polling (every minute, good enough?) in CF using <cfimap> to get the emails.
http://help.adobe.com/en_US/ColdFusion/9.0/CFMLRef/WS371453EC-36D5-44ce-BF1E-750E3016BBD6.html
We have a system like this.
We have a postfix server configured to handle mail for a domain. A small script (Perl) on the postfix server places each email on an ActiveMQ queue.
We have a cluster of CF boxes with the ActiveMQ event gateway listener that takes the messages off the queue and processes them using Java Mail.
The delay between postfix receiving the email and a CF server processing it is generally under 1s.
We needed to do it this way for a number of reasons, processing delay being one of them, dealing with a large cluster of CF which made the POP/IMAP solution complicated, and CF's mail handling not being quite what we wanted were others.
It works great.
I've created similar applications in the past using cfpop to interogate a mailbox on a scheduled basis.
It was pretty easy to write, but usually gets thrown for a loop when "users" start being "helpful" with the email content.
The other thing is that this isn't instantaneous, but is the process really time critical to the second?
I'm wondering how I could map an email adress so newsletter users could simply write to a uniquely create email address and instantly get unsubscribed.
ex:
jonh.unsubscribe.sdfg87s544fsdg6#exemple.com
And the key here is that I want it to be instantaneous, I don't want to poll a imap or pop3 account every X seconds. Is there a way to listen to the inbox? Thats my main problem... once I get the email I know what to do.
Thecnologies I use:
Postfix
Python
PHP
If your mail server supports it, what you are looking for is IMAP IDLE (https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2177)
Otherwise, you would have to poll.
Mailman does this by redirecting the mail to the program itself (it never goes to a true mailbox). Since you're using Python on your project, it might be helpful to look at how mailman interacts with mail servers.