I have a postfix server listening and receiving all emails received at mywebsite.com Now I want to show these postfix emails in a customized interface and that too for each user
To be clear, all the users of mywebsite.com will be given mail addresses like someguy#mywebsite.com who receives email on my production machine but he sees them in his own console built into his dashboard at mywebsite.com.
So to make the user see the mail he received, I need to create an email replica of the postfix mail so that mywebsite(which runs on django-python) will be reflecting them readily. How do I achieve this. To be precise this is my question, how do I convert a postfix mail to a python mail object(so that my system/website)understands it?
Just to be clear I have written psuedo code to achieve what I want:
email_as_python_object = postfix_email_convertor(postfix_email)
attachments_list = email_as_python_object.attachments
body = email_as_python_object.body # be it html or whatever
And by the way I have tried default email module which comes with python but thats not handy for all the cases. And even I need to deal with mail attachments manually(which I hate). I just need a simple way to deal with cases like these(I was wondering how postfix understands a email received. ie.. how it automatically figures out different headers,attachments etc..). Please help me.
You want to have postfix deliver to a local mailbox, and then use a webmail system for people to access that stored mail.
Don't get hung up on postfix - it just a transfer agent - it takes messages from one place, and puts them somewhere else, it doesn't store messages.
So postfix will take the messages over SMTP, and put them in local mail files.
Then IMAP or some webmail system will display those messages to your users.
If you want the mail integrated in your webapp, then you should probably run an IMAP server, and use python IMAP libraries to get the messages.
First of all, Postfix mail routing rules can be very complex and your presumably preferred solution involves a lot of trickery in the wrong places. You do not want to accidentally show some user anothers mails, do you? Second, although Postfix can do almost anything, it shouldn't as it only is a MDA (mail delivery agent).
Your solution is best solved by using a POP3 or IMAP server (Cyrus IMAPd, Courier, etc). IMAP servers can have "superuser accounts" who can read mails of all users. Your web application can then connect to the users mailbox and retreive the headers and bodys.
If you only want to show the subject-line you can fetch those with a special IMAP command and very low overhead. The Python IMAP library has not the easiest to understand API though. I'll give it a shot (not checked!) with an example taken from the standard library:
import imaplib
sess = imaplib.IMAP4()
sess.login('superuser', 'password')
# Honor the mailbox syntax of your server!
sess.select('INBOX/Luke') # Or something similar.
typ, data = sess.search(None, 'ALL') # All Messages.
subjectlines = []
for num in data[0].split():
typ, msgdata = sess.fetch(num, '(RFC822.SIZE BODY[HEADER.FIELDS (SUBJECT)])')
subject = msgdata[0][1].lstrip('Subject: ').strip()
subjectlines.append(subject)
This logs into the IMAP server, selects the users mailbox, fetches all the message-ids then fetches (hopefully) only the subjectlines and appends the resulting data onto the subjectlines list.
To fetch other parts of the mail vary the line with sess.fetch. For the specific syntax of fetch have a look at RFC 2060 (Section 6.4.5).
Good luck!
I'm not sure that I understand the question.
If you want your remote web application to be able to view users' mailbox, you could install a pop or imap server and use a mail client (you should be able to find one off the shelf) to read the emails. Alternatively, you could write something to interrogate the pop/imap server using the relevant libraries that come with Python itself.
If you want to replicate the mail to another machine, you could use procmail and set up actions to do this. Postfix can be set up to invoke procmail in this wayy.
Related
I've been writing some python scripts in order to do some automation for my work. One of the scripts is intended to gather some test results, compile the string of results with a "message" string, and send it as an email every 12-24 hours (if there are results) to each individual who needs this information. Additionally, we're running this script on Linux; either in a Jenkins pipeline, or in a crontab (this script will most likely be run via crontab).
I was initially using gmail's SMTP server (smtp.gmail.com, port 587) to send these since we're working off of our own personal gmail server anyways, and it worked for a bit once I gave the script an "App Password" since it was a "less secure app" to Google. However, after about an hour of testing with it, Google disabled the account for spam. Any subsequent accounts I try to set up for the same purpose are disabled on the spot, as well (the moment I try to send an email with it, it's halted and disabled). It's been a few days since I requested reviews on both of the accounts; but I don't think they'll get back to me any time soon, nor will it be a result in my favor.
Since Google was no longer viable, I looked online and saw that there are plenty of SMTP hosting options available, but we're not looking for a paid service just to send an email once every few days or so. In terms of free options, I was able to find one other post related to PHP/Ruby sending emails without SMTP (Send email without external SMTP service), but if possible I'd like to keep this within Linux/Python only unless there is a simpler way, or a way that links well with Linux/Python. Even then, I'm still concerned that using SMTP is necessary for our gmail accounts to receive these emails. If I'm wrong, please correct me; because it certainly seems that way to me.
Based off of the situation, how could I adjust my strategy in order to automate email updates of this nature?
How do i send an email whenever a user requests it?. I thought on a script that sends mails every hour with some content relevant for the recipients, but I dont like the idea of spamming mail to other people. So i would like to send this mail whenever the recipients wants it. For example if this user sends me a mail with a keyword, i would like the sript to run and send the mail back with the content already made up. So, there is no spam and information is sent in a more efficient way.
I appreciate your help in advance.
This is a pretty complex and broad question.
First off, you would need a server or your PC to have the script running all the time or periodically fire off via cron.
Secondly, you would need to keep some kind of job queue where you would register that a user has sent you an email requesting that you send them one in response. There are well developed and complex job queues like Celery, but you could potentially do with something less complex - maybe a Google Sheets table.
Thirdly, you would need to parse emails you receive in order to get the keywords and email addresses. If you go the gmail + google sheets route, you could do it with some custom code probably, but otherwise you would need to implement email checking on your PC or server. Once you parse them, you add them to the jobs queue.
Finally, you need to provide email access to your Py script - meaning SMTP login. The docs have more on this.
As you can see, there are a lot of things to consider and implement, so you maybe better off trying to narrow down your question a bit. :)
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 am developing an email parsing application using python POP3 library on a linux server using Dovecot email server. I have parsed the emails to get the contents and the attachments etc. using POP3 library.
Now the issue is how to notify a user or actually the application that a new email has arrived? I guess there should be some notification system on email server itself which I am missing or something on linux which we can use to implement the same.
Please suggest.
Thanks in advance.
POP3 does not have push ability. Like a regular ol' post office you need to actually go to check your e-mail. IMAP does have functionality similar to (but not exactly the same as) mail pushing. I'd suggest taking a look at it.
As far as I read, Django only supports sending mails using SMTP.
I would like to send Emails from my script in Django, but do not want to setup SMTP server (it's too complex for me, I'm a linux newbie).
Is it possible, to send mails in Django in the same way like I do it in PHP, without providing SMTP login, password and etc?
PHP uses sendmail on UNIX system to send emails. I guess at some point when you set up the system, this is, sendmail is configured.
There is an API to sendmail for Python, maybe it helps you. But there is a SMTP server involved in any case ;)
Postfix and Exim were built to deal with all of the problems associated with forwarding email from your host to the rest of the world. Your app speaks SMTP to them, and they turn around and speak SMTP with the destination. But they're very, very good at it.
There is nothing stopping you from doing a DNS lookup for the MX records of the email address you're sending to and connecting straight to that server and speaking SMTP to it. Nothing except that nagging voice that should be asking you "Is this really easier than apt-get install exim4?"
So how does PHP do it? By magic?
If you don't have an SMTP server, sign up for a GMail account and use that.
Your hosting provider might have set up the host and any possible login credentials for all the PHP pages on their machines. This would make it seem like none are required. Your hosting provider should be more than happy to give you the information. Try searching for SMTP in their FAQ, forum, and any welcome emails they sent. If your search does not turn anything up, ask them directly.
Once you have the information, you will want to add it to your settings.py file using these email settings:
# *** settings.py ***
#EMAIL_HOST = 'host here'
#EMAIL_PORT = 587
#EMAIL_HOST_USER = 'your user here'
#EMAIL_HOST_PASSWORD = 'your password'
#EMAIL_USE_TLS = True
Uncomment and use as many of these settings as you need.
I suppose since you're using Django you're fine with Python in general. There's a new Python MTA evolving which looks very promising http://lamsonproject.org/docs/hooking_into_django.html