We would like to implement a feature by which users could send an email to an application specific address and we will parse the message and take certain actions on it, similar to 37signals's backpack (and probably some of their other apps).
If anyone has done something similar, could you fill me in on how you did so? I'm unsure on how to, at a high-level, 'import' the email into the app so that I could process it.
Thank you.
I have recently implemented that exact functionality in rails. I would advice you to look at the 'Receive E-mail Reliably via POP or IMAP' in the the Advanced Rails Recipes book.
I've personally found that the best source for getting this up and running and it explains how to do far better than I can. Good luck which ever way you choose to do it :)
Here's how I fetch from a POP server:
require 'net/pop'
pop = Net::POP3.new('mail.yourdomain.com')
pop.start(account, password)
pop.each_mail do |m|
email = TMail::Mail.parse(m.pop)
email.base64_decode
OttoMailer.process_email_in(email, m.unique_id)
m.delete
end
pop.finish
Why not run a Ruby SMTP mailserver, which will receive the mails via port 25, and then you can parse/interpret etc. as you wish ?
(I say Ruby since that's how you've tagged your question)
An alternative solution is to run procmail (or similar), pattern match on the subject, and then invoke scripts (configured in the .procmailrc file). However that may not scale so well for large volumes of mail.
ActionMailer can receive e-mails as well as send them! I don't remember how this is done but if you look at the documentation you can see it there. But from memory the e-mail gets piped through procmail into a script in the script directory.
There seems to be a book on the subject as well.
Good luck! :)
Related
I helping a client with a Umbraco 4 solution. When they send a email message to some special email addresses Umbraco picks them up and creates news post with the email subject, message and picture. One of the emails are failing. Do any of you now where i need to look?
That's not very specific, this could have been achieved in one of many ways. Umbraco doesn't have anything like that built in, so my guess would be that there's a scheduled task that checks the email account somewhere and creates the posts.
To check if the scheduled task is being run by Umbraco, look in /config/umbracoSettings.config and look for the <scheduledTasks> element. If there's something listed there, that might give you a clue of where to look.
If there's nothing there, the task is probably being run from elsewhere (windows task scheduler, or event hooks on the mail server maybe), so you'd have to look there.
You could also check the /config/BaseRestExtensions.config file and see if there are any endpoints listed there that might give you a clue as to where the code that does the page creation might live.
this is kind of a dumb question, but is it possible to send a
flash[:success]
directed to a certain user other than the current user on the screen? in one of my controllers i have
if #article.up_votes.count > 10
flash[:success ] = 'something'
end
is it possible to send that flash to the owner of the article? as opposed to my own screen? or is there another way to do this?
i tried looking through
http://api.rubyonrails.org/classes/ActionDispatch/Flash/FlashHash.html#method-i-notice
but couldn't find any method that would help. maybe i am reading it wrong? is there a way to achieve the same effect then?
thank you...
Not using flash, you'd have to try something else, there are lots of ways to go about it, but flash isn't one of them. Well, you could still use flash, but it wouldn't be to send from one user to another, you could cause a flash message to appear for the user being notified.
First thing to figure out is how do you notify the other user, when would he get that notification, do you want him to get notified anytime he using your site? Or only if he does something specific on your site?
For what I know the best way to go, maybe the only way actually is push notifications. There are many ways to achieve this but I think faye should be the easiest.
See this screencast to understand it and later. You want to have a channel for each user so it will be the one to get that message. Further search for private pub so nobody's can listen to others channel
http://railscasts.com/episodes/260-messaging-with-faye
http://railscasts.com/episodes/316-private-pub
As ismaelga mentioned I also think push notifications is the way to go (WebSockets).
In addition to Faye you can use a hosted solution called Pusher (pusher.com).
Here is a really short description about how Pusher can help you. Bassically all users using your application listens for messages on a WebSocket-server (through JavaScript). In this case Pusher. You can then send messages to Pusher via your Rails application. When you send a message to Pusher, all users will instantly be notified about the new message via JavaScript (through the WebSocket). To only notify a specific user you can use Pusher's "private channels"-feature.
Pusher have some really good documentation on how to use their service: http://pusher.com/docs/javascript_quick_start
This picture (taken from Nettuts+) might also give you a better understanding of how Pusher works: http://d2o0t5hpnwv4c1.cloudfront.net/1059_pusher/pusher_websocket.png
Hope this helps a bit.
I would like to make an emailing in my symfony project.
The user admin log-in in the backend and click on the button "start emailing", then 8000 emails is sending (2 per second). The admin user can close his page and go back a few moment later to see the emailing's progression. (10%...., then 20%... etc).
How can i do ? I think a have to use CRON TASK, but i'm not sure...
Maybe there is a better/other solution ?
Can you explain me the best way to program my emailing ?
Thanks, and sorry for my english!
The best way to rate the sending would be setting your MTA to do that for you. If it's a application requirement then go for Gearman. There is this awesome wrapper for the PHP interface (http://www.symfony-project.org/plugins/sfGearmanPlugin). It works really well.
Cron tasks do not know if the previous running instance has finished the job. It really messes thing easily up. For those cases, like yours, that you need to back processing, the best choice is a solution like Gearman.
what do people use for incoming email in rails 3 for multi accounts applications ?
It seems like actionmailer just uses one account to send and receive from ?
Look forward to your feedback.
Thanks
Rick
have a look at http://cloudmailin.com/
Procmail with a small handler script to load the email contents into the database. Procmail is universal, simple, and pretty much unbreakable for this sort of job.
I'm working at a helpdesk application where i have a standalone script that queries a mail server and parses the mail it finds there.
I'm facing the following issue: How do i figure it out in a reliable way what mail is in reply to what mail?
I could add something in the subject like "[ticket:21312]" and look for that but what if the user changes the subject? Is there another way? Can i do it by setting a custom mail header and look for that or the header will not be preserved between mail servers on reply back from user?
What about when i send a message from my application to a non existing user or a user that has quota full and his server replies back with the usual standard message "the mail daemon at .... could not ...." then the subject will also be modified and i can't place the message correctly as a reply to an existing mail.
How does gmail do it? There the messages are sorted perfectly in almost all of the cases.
in helpdesk email piping there are 3 basic methods:
a) include the id in the subject somewhere (works fine in practice)
b) have the id in the body somewhere
c) use an auto-generated email alias with the id, like "case-76236781980893#helpdesk.mycompany.com". that can easily be handled by something like procmail or a script to pick out the id.
gmail might use a combination of the subject, In-Reply-To header (may not be defined) (References and Original-Message-ID headers possibly as well), and various heuristics, which work very well, but of course not necessarily bulletproof, and slightly more involved to implement. something like nestscape's original threading algorithm perhaps. though some have reported that gmail doesn't use the In-Reply-To header and relies mostly on the subject (as in this post).
As you say custom headers might get lost and the subject might change. Use both. If one exists then you can identify the thread. I don't know of any better way to solve this.
If your message was sent with a Message-ID-Header any standards-conform mailer should add a In-Reply-To-Header referencing your Id. Additionally Referencesshould contain a list of all previous mails in this thread.
This works with most mail clients, to be safe for the bad clients you have to use the subject, the easy way is by adding the "[issue:123]" thing, a secondary fallback is to recognize the subject (after cutting of the "Re:" part in all the variations) for this it could help that you know most of your legitimate senders ...