I'm moving the mailserver (imap).
In the last century, when everybody was using pop3, I made a script which allowed everybody to login, and fetch a message saying "Hey, update your settings".
Now, everybody are using imap, which seems a little more complicated...
Is there a simple dummy imapd server available which does that?
Or just a script (netcat?) which can collect the usernames, so I can contact the few remaining users?
In theory the simplest of scripts will do:
#!/bin/sh
echo '* OK [ALERT] Mail has moved, ask Leif'
echo '* BYE'
In practice the ALERT may or may not be displayed to the users.
Capturing login names is more complicated and perhaps not worth the trouble.
Related
I have problems sending mail from a ruby production app on heroku by a gmail smtp account.
Here i found the solution
When i apply the solution all works wel, but after a while the problems comes back.
Do i have to set something in my google account to make it permanent ?
I think it has to do with the fact that i am using a free heroku account.
The servers stops after a while an perhaps has to login in gmail when it starts up again.
There's no way to make it permanent because Gmail doesn't want its service to be used to send out automated e-mails(*).
There are some providers that will make it much easier for you:
https://sendgrid.com/pricing/ has a free plan (up to 100 emails/day)
https://postmarkapp.com/pricing gives you 10k emails for 10$)
or take your pick, because the market seem to be pretty saturated: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=e-mail+delivery+service&ia=web
(*) What I suspect they do (though I could not find info about it) is that they can see if "same e-mails" are sent within short intervals.
You might try your luck (if it makes sens, when for example it's a toy project) to alter each e-mail contents to make it seem like different e-mail each time. But it will be just easier to go with free option in any other providers that actually want you to use it in your app.
Woo-hoo! Thanks that we have mailhog for reliable Docker-based testing environments for outbound mail ... allowing us to easily debug mail-sending services without bothering production users ...
... but what about inbound emails?
On one of our sites, users can send an email to a designated support-address and their email will automagically be entered into a ticket system. (As you can well imagine, I am now tasked with replacing that system.) So, is(n't) there already a sort of "reverse mailhog" system, which would allow me to define an "incoming-mail server" which I could from time to time say "had just received thus-and-so message?"
Since this now seems to me to be "just as obvious a requirement as the one 'mailhog' so adroitly solved," I now ask the community – am I overlooking something wonderful that I literally don't yet know about? (Pretty-please tell me in your reply that the answer is 'yes.')
I'm trying to implement a webmail in PHP. I would like to write a PHP CLI script which is run on every email arrival to store some parts of (not all of) incoming email into database for search purposes. Then when the user finished searching and chose an email to show, a connection is made to mail server to retrieve the complete email. In order to implement this scenario I need to make some sort of connection among emails within database and mail server.
Since my knowledge of working with mail servers is limited to Zend Framework's API, what I believe I need in order to retrieve an email from an IMAP server is a message number or a message unique id (this later one seems not to be supported by all mail servers).
To this point, I've managed to find .forward (and some other ways) to introduce my PHP CLI script to MTAs to be run on every email arrival. This way I can store emails to database. But this won't do since message unique id is created by MDA so MTA do not know of it and they can not provide it to me. This means I can not find emails later when I want to retrieve them from mail server.
At last, here's my question: Is there a way to introduce a PHP CLI script to a MDA for emails' arrival? If this is dependent on the mail server, which servers do support this and how? My personal choice would be Dovecot or Courier, but any other mail server would do as well.
This is tricky -- there are many ways on how to setup delivery. Some of them work with the underlying mail store directly, bypassing your IMAP server altogether, while others use e.g. Dovecot's facilities.
Have you considered building on top of the notify plugin which ships with Dovecot?
It seems like it's impossible to introduce such a PHP CLI script to IMAP server (at least I'm sure of Dovecot). Anyway, the work around I found for this problem is to use my own PHP script to insert the new mails into IMAP server and retrieve their id's and then store the id in database for future references. To be clear, email are given to my PHP CLI script by MTA, not MDA. As I said before this is done easily using .forward file.
[UPDATE]
Unfortunately it seems this solution can not be implemented as well. The way to insert a new email to IMAP server is APPEND command, and to have the UID of the recently added mail server must support UIDPLUS extension. Neither Dovecot nor Courier supports this extension at the moment! If they did it seems the server would return the UID with a APPENDUID response.
[UPDATE]
It is my bad since Courier does support UIDPLUS. So this solution is valid and the one I'm going to implement.
I need to check email accounts whether exists or not, I need to do that using Delphi and Indy (if possible)
I have a windows database for ERP system and I need to make sure that the customer enter valid email into the system so I can send to my customer the quotes they request.
I tried to test on yahoo and google using send commands HELO, MAIL and RCPT but no success.
Mail servers have to protect themselves against spammers and others with malicious intent. They are not going to give up their secrets easily. It is common for mail servers to be configured to black hole messages sent to non-existent recipients. They don't respond to the sender saying, "sorry, that user doesn't exist, please try again."
So, if you want to verify whether or not an e-mail address has a human behind it I think the only way to be sure is to send an e-mail requesting a response.
You have to ask your customers to confirm their email address, i.e. entering it twice to reduce misspellings, asking to register and sending an activation link and so on. State explicitly they need a valid email address: if they're asking you a quote why should they enter an invalid address? But be aware some people may use disposable email addresses to protect their real ones.
You have no way to check if an address really exists just asking its server. Due to the large amount of spam and techniques implemented by spammer to harvest and clean their addresses lists, most servers are setup to defend themselves.
That's why I suggested to "be polite". I am sorry if you got it the wrong way, I was just telling you that if your application shows a "spammer-like" behaviour (and your previous version of the question was much unclearer about your aims), it can lead to your IPs being blacklisted. Then you can have much more troubles to send quotes to customers.
You may try ICS components, an open source library with good examples (see SMTPClient).
So this library or another one will not tell you if an email account exists or not because it's depending on the way the host answer to the commands about a non existent account.
In ICS, when the command have been sent you may have to manage an event : SmtpRequestDone(Sender: TObject; RqType: TSmtpRequest;ErrorCode: Word);
Where ErrorCode is the Error code (ie 550).
When a user completes an order at my online store, he gets an email confirmation.
Currently we're sending this email via Gmail (which we chose over sendmail for greater portability) after we authorize the user's credit card and before we show him a confirmation message (i.e., synchronously).
It's working fine in development, but I'm wondering if this will cause a problem in production. Will it require making the user wait too long? Will many simultaneous Gmail connections get us in trouble? Any other general caveats?
If sending the emails synchronously will be a problem, could someone recommend an asynchronous solution (is ar_mailer any good?)
The main issue I can think of is that Gmail limits the amount of email you can send daily, so if you get too many orders a day it might break.
As they say :
"In an effort to fight spam and
prevent abuse, Google will temporarily
disable your account if you send a
message to more than 500 recipients or
if you send a large number of
undeliverable messages. If you use a
POP or IMAP client (Microsoft Outlook
or Apple Mail, e.g.), you may only
send a message to 100 people at a
time. Your account should be
re-enabled within 24 hours. "
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=22839
I would recommend using sendmail on your server in order to have greater control over what's going on and don't depend on another service, especially when sendmail is not really complicated to set up.
The internet is not as resilient as some people would have you believe, the link between you and GMail will break at some point or GMail will go offline causing the user to think that they have not paid sucessfully.
I would put some other queue in place, sendmail sounds acceptable and you can't create your site now for where it 'might' be hosted in the future.
Ryan
If the server waits for the email to be sent before giving the user any feedback, were there problems connecting to the mailserver (timeouts, server down etc) the user request would timeout too and he wouldn't be told anything about the status of his order, so I believe you should really do this asynchronously.
Also, you should check whether doing that is even allowed by GMail's TOS. If that's not the case, you may check if that's allowed if you purchase one of their subscriptions. Also, there's surely a limit to the number of outgoing emails you may send within a given timeframe so if you're expecting your online store to be successful, you may hit that limit and bump into some nasty issue. If you're not self-hosting the site, you should check whether your host offers email servers (several plans include them for free) as then using your host's ISP would be the most obvious choice.
FACT: Gmail crashes. Not often, but it happens, and you can't control it or test it.
The simplest quick-fix is to start a separate thread or fork a subprocess to send the email. Yes, there likely will arise problems from using Gmail, and I really have no input on that vs. the alternatives. But from a design perspective, there's just no reason to make the user wait for that process to complete.
From a testing perspective, this might be where a proxy pattern might come in handy. It might be easy for you to directly invoke Gmail to send a message. Make it harder. Put in a proxy object that does the mailing for you that you can turn off (because heaven knows you can't for testing purposes make Gmail crash). Just make your team follow what happens in the event of an email malfunction by turning off the proxy and trying to complete an order. If you are doing it synchronously, then all the plagues mentioned here by other posters will rear their heads. If you are doing it asynchronously, you should be able to allow it to fail silently (from the user's perspective--from your perspective there should be enormous logging statements and text messages in the middle of the night and possibly a mild electric current arcing across the surface of someone's skin).