I need to do the following and I was wondering if anyone has done something similar, and if so what they did.
I need to write a program that will handle incoming emails for different clients, process them, and then depending on the email address, do something (add to database, reply, etc).
The thing that makes this a little more challenging is that the email addresses aren't static they are dynamic. For example. The emails would be something like this. dynamic-email1#dynamic-subdomain1.domain.com . The emails are grouped by client using a dynamic subdomain in this example it would be 'dynamic-subdomain1'. A client would have their own subdomain that is assigned to them. Each client can create their own email address under their subdomain, and assign an event to that email. These email addresses and subdomains can change all of the time, new ones added, old ones removed, etc.
So for example if an email comes in for the email 'dynamic-email1#dynamic-subdomain1.domain.com' then I would need to look up in the database to find out which client is assigned the 'dynamic-subdomain1' subdomain and then look to see which event maps to the email address of 'dynamic-email1' and then execute that event. I have the event processing already, I'm just not sure how to map the email addresses to the event.
Since the email addresses are dynamic, it would be a real pain to handle this with file based configuration files, it would be nice to look up in a database instead. I did some research and I found some projects that do something similar but not exactly. The closest that I found is Zed Shaw's Lamson project: http://lamsonproject.org
More background:
I'm using python, django, linux, mysql, memcached currently.
Questions:
Has anyone used Lamson to do what I'm looking to do, how did you like it?
Is there any other projects that do something similar, maybe in a different language besides python?
How would I setup my DNS MX record to handle something like this?
Thanks for your help.
Update:
I did some more research on the google app engine suggestion and it might work but I would need to change too many things and it would add too many moving parts. I would also need a catch all emailer forwarder, anyone know of any good cheap ones? I prefer to deploy on system that handles all email. It looks like people have used postfix listening on port 25 and forwarding requests to lamson. This seems reasonable, I'm going to try it out and see how it goes. I'll update with my results.
Update 2:
I did some more research and I found a couple of websites that do something like this for me, so I'm going to look at them next.
http://mailgun.net
http://www.emailyak.com
I've done some work on a couple projects using dynamic email addresses, but never with dynamic subdomains at the same time. My thoughts on your questions:
I've never used Lamson, so I can't comment on that.
I usually use App Engine's API to receive and handle incoming messages, and it works quite well. You could easily turn each received message into a basic POST request on your own server with e.g. To, From, Subject, and Message fields and handle those with standard django.
One downside with GAE email is having to use *#yourappname.appspotmail.com, but you could get around that by setting up a catch-all email forwarder for *#yourdomain.com to direct everything to secretaddress#yourappname.appspotmail.com. That would let you receive the messages on the custom domain and handle them with GAE.
The other issue/benefit with GAE is using Google's servers instead of your own (at least for the email bit).
For the subdomain issue, you could try setting up wildcard DNS for the MX records, which (in theory) would direct all mail sent to any subdomain to the same server(s). This would enable you to receive email on all subdomains (for better or worse--look out for spam!)
For lamson, have you tried something as simple as:
#route("(address)#(subdomain).(host)", address=".+", subdomain="[^\.]+")
def START(message, address=None, subdomain=None, host=None):
....
Related
I have been putting together a website using vanilla JavaScript, HTML, Python (Flask) and SQLAlchemy
I’m using 2 linode servers. One for the website, one for the database
I contacted linode and they unblocked the email ports, and I configured gmail to allow less-secure apps.
As of right now I am using Flask-Mail and it uses my gmail username and password to log in, and everything on the website is functioning exactly how I want it to
I only use email for 3 things:
registration confirmation
recover account password
I would like to send emails to users who sign up with site updates, once per month at the most.
However, I’ve seen many people say gmail is not good for production. My main concern is that some people have said gmail will limit your outgoing correspondence to 100 people.
I really don’t anticipate a high volume. If it exceeds 100 people I would be surprised tbh, but I want to be able to handle at least a couple thousand at the most.
I’d prefer not to get bogged down with changing all of the code and dealing with setting up a separate email server and all of that. If there’s a solution as simple as “hey use this website and user login instead of your gmail account” that would be great.
If that’s not acceptable, I understand. I’m just looking for the easiest solution that doesn’t necessarily have to be amazingly scalable at the moment.
Thanks in advance!
SendGrid is a great option. Their free teir allows you to send 100 emails per day and can scale up if you do find your application is gaining momentum. Below are the setting you'd use to configure your flask app (and flask-mail) to be able to use the service. This is derived from a tutorial that SendGrid itself provides here for configuring a flask app with flask-mail.
MAIL_DEFAULT_SENDER="theemailyouwanttoshow#site.com"
MAIL_USERNAME="apikey"
MAIL_PASSWORD="SG.abcdjekfkdmd"
MAIL_SERVER="smtp.sendgrid.net"
MAIL_PORT=587
MAIL_USE_TLS=1
MAIL_USE_SSL=0
Premise: I am a beginner in search for an easy way to send bug reports from users over sea.
I've made a script for some friends that are living on the other side of the sea (US - EUROPE)... I will like to gather automatic bug reports whenever they happen. So my first idea was to send myself an email with the smtplib module. It works fine when testing home, but as soon as the sender "sends", my email provider (gmail) blocks the connection because of course, its from an "unknown device". I've already enabled "Allow less secure apps" as someone suggested but with no avail.
What I am searching its a simple way of dealing with this.
Yes I could make the script to ignore the error if the email its not being sent, and then go into my google account and enable those devices so at least it will work from the second run..
But it doesn't seem what a programmer would do in this case. I am learning so a solution withing the language is what I am after.
A different provider that has no restriction its also a good start but I tried Yahoo, Live, Yandex but I couldn't make them work. Are there any?
So my question is: how others do? what is the best solution for some one like me?
I've read about sentry or other error/bug tracking but its obviously way too much for want I need
You should certainly not incorporate e.g. Gmail credentials in the code that is remotely executed on devices you do not control, given I understand correctly the Gmail less secure device issue happens as every "user" is running this code and using your credentials. This holds true for any other provider.
Now this won't exactly be simple but one way to go about it would be to create a server side API endpoint that can accept HTTP(s) or any other protocol requests that then will authenticate in a little more secure way on the server side with Gmail.
The concept for emails is:
Bug > Python Script > API call > Email
This could be implemented using Python on the API side (Flask e.g.) using an AWS Lambda Function with Amazon API Gateway, but again that is something to get through and understand by itself which will take a good chunk of time.
You need to touch a lot of concepts, like auth tokens to make this really secure.
Could you elaborate a little on where the code needs to run and if you are willing to try AWS or any other cloud provider, or would have access to an internet connected server ? This makes it easier to provide you with a full example on the solution in a hackish way while I would highlight the problems you could face on the security side.
I understand that this is not the way to go but as for my needs and my level of experience it works for me!
Yandex allows you to send email from different ip so Yandex is the way to go. What I was doing wrong in the first place was to use the wrong port (587 instead of 465)
I've set up a free account on Google App Engine, and I currently have something like this deployed:
import webapp2
class MainHandler(webapp2.RequestHandler):
def get(self):
self.redirect('http://x.x.x.x:9000/')
This works and accomplishes what I was in the basic sense but since it's just issuing a http redirect I don't get my fancy Google Domain name and it ends up being the ip address (and port) of the final server. I am aware of why this happens, but was hoping for a solution that would preserve the domain name (and leave the port hidden).
Normally for something like this, you'd just have a rewrite rule in Apache, but that only works if both URLs are hosted by that same server. When the two servers are different, you'd probably go with some transparent proxy (Squid?), but I don't have a server capable of hosting that (this is for personal use, and though my router is ddwrt, I've had no luck getting squid installed on it).
So is there a python one-liner that let's me proxy to a single address but is smart enough to mangle resource requests and send along any request headers? I've found various solutions for writing proxies in python, but they seem overly complicated because they're intended to be general purpose.
This isn't even easy to google, since the obvious keywords all bring back too many results with only slightly relevant results.
You are looking for a reverse proxy setup. Here is one that I have used before. https://code.google.com/p/bs2grproxy/
You can either setup the DNS to point your domain directly to the IP address OR you can use urlfetch.
However, please keep in mind that urlfetch has quota and limitations [1]. It might not be worth it just to have a "pretty domain/URL".
[1] https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/quotas#UrlFetch
I am trying to fetch mails from another mailbox (xxx#domail.com or xxx#gmail.com) in google-app-engine.
I don't want to read mails from appspotmail box as it is being used for different purpose.
Is there any efficient way in which i can make this happen.
Two options:
You could read an inbox via POP/IMAP, but this requires a bit of coding. You also need to have Outgoing Sockets API enabled, which requires you to have a paid app. This approach is async, which means you will constantly need to poll for new messages.
Forward emails to a new appspotmail address (you can have many). This is pretty easy, especially since you already process incoming emails. Since you can have multiple accounts, e.g. xyz#yourappid.appspotmail.com, you can distinguish between them in code.
You can use imap+oauth to read email from a google address. If you google it the very first result is what you need. https://developers.google.com/gmail/oauth_overview
I'm wondering how to achieve that nice feature I see on many websites today: when having conversations on social networks like Facebook or Linkedin, you can always answer an online message or status (which is not an email), by answering the email notification you receive. How do they achieve that?
As far as I can tell, I'd see two options:
Configure a mail server to fetch the emails and transmit the information to a Python (in my case) script to handle the data and save a database record that can be simply displayed afterwards on the website
Have a Python script running in the background, checking the mail server for incoming emails every few seconds (via pop3 or something)
Is there any other option? Has somebody already implemented this? What are the main pitfalls to look at? I'm asking this because I'd like to implement something similar on a web application I'm currently working on.
Thanks!
J
EDIT: I found this link which partially answers my question already: Django/Python: email reply is updated to site
I too am working on something similar and finding this https://github.com/pinax/django-notification useful. Check it out, you'll get an idea how to implement what you want.