I am working on an email polling solution, for a multi-user system. So users can send emails on their respective ids and it would be polled and inserted to a db.
There are two options that I am considering:
Perl/Unix based email pollers..
A java based poller.
What would you recommend.. (other suggestions are also welcome)
Instead of polling, why don't you forward the mail to a process? Depending on the mail server you use, you can do that as an alias or even in the .forward file.
I've nothing much to add to this, but there's currently a project at google code to rebuild iwantsandy.com as open source.
It's at:
http://code.google.com/p/sandysback/
I'm definitely going to be watching this to see how they parse emails, and have those emails "inserted into a db"
Whichever language you have most experience in!
I personally know java and perl well and for this task I would choose perl but the differneces are marginal.
Perl would be shorter and sweeter, java would be take longer but probably be a more robust solution once the database access is sorted out.
I find Perl DBI is a better and more portable database interface than JDBC which does not hide database implementations from your code and is sensitive to version changes etc. I.E. you must have the right version of the right database driver for your target database.
RE: Poling
If you have the option to forward the email to a process I would highly recommended you do that. (Forwarding generally puts less load on the server than poling does.) If not, then poling is the next best thing. Look into the POP3 client libraries on whichever language you are most comfortable with.
RE: Language choice
If I intended to do a lot of parsing of the emails then Perl would be my choice. If not much parsing is involved then Java would be the way to go for me ;-).
-- In a former life I wrote a Perl script to parse (well structured) incoming emails into HTML pages and post them to a web server.
You have a couple of options. As the orginal poster said - probably the simplest way is to set up an entry in the aliases file to a script.
Then the body of the email gets passed as standard input to the script. You can then use a perl script + Mime modules to parse out the bits of the message and do whatever you want with it.
One might also look at apache james - which is a custom mail server. They have the equivilent of servlets, called 'maillets' that you put your business logic in. They often hard to deploy in enterprise scenario's though as most companies don't like having custom mailservers being deployed.
... the aliases route is probably your best bet. one other note of caution - email isn't gauranteed. if you are using this as some sort of app to app messaging system, and you control both ends, you should probably look at something else, like JMS type messaging.
-Ace
Related
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.
I am trying to get our iSeries 6.1 machine to send email through our Exchange server. I can do it with SNDDST and with SNDSMTPEMM, but both are very limiting. I need support for basic HTML, and for PDF attachments. I thought I could get them both from SNDSMTPEMM, but now I see that the body parameter for SNDSMTPEMM (NOTE) is limited to 400 characters. Is it possible that this command allows 10 attachments but less than a paragraph of text?
I would like to know if anyone is using this command, and if I am missing something about it that would allow me to create an actual email message.
If indeed I can't put more than 400 characters into the body of an email with this command, I have read about MMAIL and MAILTOOL and I am curious if anyone knows if this message length restriction exists for those as well?
It will be a very hard sell for our main programmer to install any third-party anything to get this working, so I would love to be able to do it with SNDDST of SNDSMTPEMM (or some other built in I haven't found yet).
I don't currently need to be able to send to multiple recipients, but I do need to be able to attach a couple of attachments (where SNDDST fails for me). I also can't use attachments with an *LMSG.
I'm sorry if this is the wrong place for this kind of post - I find it very difficult to find the right place.
The SNDSMTPEMM command is indeed limited to 400 characters in the message body, according to the documentation.
Where I work, we still mainly use MMAIL, which used to be free but now requires a $50 "donation" (and lots of hoops to jump through just to register). It doesn't have that message length limitation. It comes with several commands for ease of use, and a service program for more fine-grained control over how the message is built. Once you download it, you have access to the source, so you can really muck around with it if you have to. (The donation also allows you to download a multitude of other utilities from Easy400.net.)
A better but more expensive option is Bradley Stone's MAILTOOL. It's still competitively priced, as far as commercial IBM midrange software goes. If you go that route, it's probably worth getting the Plus! add-on, which side-steps IBM's native SMTP, a recurring source of headaches. (MMAIL and the basic MAILTOOL rely on native SMTP.)
The best place for this kind of post, at least for now, is the Midrange-L mailing list at midrange.com. When it comes to AS/400, iSeries, and IBM i stuff, that community is currently much more active than Stack Overflow, and they welcome open-ended discussion and "what do you recommend?" posts, which are discouraged here. You can find some discussion on the command you mentioned, and some alternatives, in this thread.
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.
this one is of clumsy implementation type and I have small knowledge about MS products.
Task: Access MS Exchange Server (outlook or whatever) and parse all unread emails with specific sent date, subject, from address. Certain data should be saved during parsing (like a flag/boolean array or something similar)
Requirements: should be done either through scripting language (no matter which one, looks like VBS suits this task) or any other method that will be able to perform slight analysis and return an exit code and a message (I'm thinking about web services that might exist in OWA, or any thing else).
Thanks in advance.
Use a driver or dll for you language of choice, I know C# / VB have libraries to accomplish this. A web server is fine if its going to not be a headache setting up access between servers, or if its on the same box with permissions.
Should do the trick, I would personally use C# as it would make this incredibly easy with the .net libraries and OLEDrivers.
I would like to know if and how it is possible to create a clickable email-link for websites, that are "encrypted" in a way emailspiders can't collect them and it is still possible for living users to click it to open in email-clients or even copy it.
I saw some links that were done in javascript but I on't know how they did this and how "safe" they are.
thank you in advance for any reply
Most approaches to this are splitting the address across multiple elements and inserting extra formatting; then for JS-enabled browsers, they use JavaScript to turn it back into an e-mail address.
The poster example for this is SpamSpan, which even has several "levels" of obfuscation - each level progressively less and less resembles an e-mail in the source code, yet it still manages to piece it back together by JS. Although some spambots today are supposedly capable of executing JavaScript, te vast majority doesn't - and the e-mails are still human-readable with JS off. An advantage of JS-assisted de/obfuscation is that it doesn't rely on external servers, you just need to (simply) integrate the JS library.
Another approach is taken by reCAPTCHA Mailhide - the e-mail is revealed only after solving a CAPTCHA (same type as for normal reCAPTCHA). This is less convenient for the user, but practically safe against robots. A disadvantage of this is that it depends on reCAPTCHA's servers (in essence, on Google) - some people are dead-set against any external dependencies.
This would be a very simple and effective way:
Scramble email addresses
All it does is convert it into ASCII, and all you need to do is insert it where your email address would go!
Although there are more (crazily) secure ways you can choose, this would be the simply option. You can also try this solution, it uses JavaScript to protect your email.
Hope this helps!