Handling Incoming Mail

Ian the Terrible has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

When I first learned that sendmail could pipe incoming messages to a program, a number of interesting possibilities occurred to me. One that I'm especially interested in exploring is the idea of stuffing messages from a mailing list into a database, thus giving me ways to search by sender, subject, full-text...

So as a first step, I whopped up a simple script that just prints STDIN to a temp file, so I could see exactly what was coming in and get a handle on how to parse it.

This led to exploration of MIME types, base64 encoding, and various other things.

My question: Is this a reasonable way to be doing this, or would it be easier (from the standpoint of processing the mail) to let the mail flow into a mailbox, and then parse it from there?

One way gives real time processing; the other would obviously have to be a periodic cron job.

I poked around briefly on CPAN, and was overwhelmed by the sheer number of modules that deal with email in one fashion or another. Anybody got favorites?

--Ian

Comment on Handling Incoming Mail

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Handling Incoming Mail by blakem (Monsignor) on Dec 11, 2001 at 13:15 UTC
Mail::Audit is the way to go... For your mailing-list stuff, I'd check out Mail::ListDetector and Mail::Audit::List. These three modules are rumored to work very well together. Actually the first thing you should do is read Simon Cozens' article Mail Filtering with Mail::Audit. It is a rather thorough introduction, and will help you set things up quickly and correctly. -Blake	[reply]
Re: Handling Incoming Mail by dws (Chancellor) on Dec 11, 2001 at 10:45 UTC
I poked around briefly on CPAN, and was overwhelmed by the sheer number of modules that deal with email in one fashion or another. Anybody got favorites? I like Mail::Audit. It's a flexible starting point if you're looking to write a `procmail` replacement.	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Handling Incoming Mail by BazB (Priest) on Dec 11, 2001 at 15:00 UTC
I'm not an expert when it comes to Perl by any means, but I'd personally let the mail go into a mailbox and parse it from there, rather than grab it from STDIN. Let the mail delivery system worry about getting the messages into the right place, and more importantly, written to the filesystem - so that you've got a chance of recovering some information if something goes wrong (i.e. power outage, OS crash). Once you're sure that you successfully inserted the information into your database, then you can delete the message from the mail spool. As far as I can make out, your current setup is STDIN Temp file(s) email parser (which will create its own temp files - outputting to core might be a bad idea if your incoming emails might be large). The database. In my head you could let the mailsystem handle the first 2 steps - I'd start by slurping the mailspool into a parser. Baz.	[reply]
Re: Re: Handling Incoming Mail by jbert (Priest) on Dec 11, 2001 at 16:42 UTC
Yep. I second this. You really don't want a simple error in your script resulting in lots of bounce messages going back to list admins. Of course, what you are describing isn't a million miles away from using procmail/rules on the server to filter different lists into different folders and then using a protocol like IMAP to run queries against the folders to find certain messages. Some IMAP server (Cyrus?) use a database for message storage so you should get better-than-grep performance. There a million ways to skin this cat. The tricky bit of the feline is the bit before the mail has been delivered, since errors then will result in lost mail and/or bounces going back (if your MTA considers that it hasn't discharged its duties it feels honour bound to confess to others).	[reply]
Re: Handling Incoming Mail by hatter (Pilgrim) on Dec 11, 2001 at 19:16 UTC
Mail::Audit and Mail::ListDetector will almost certainly save you a lot of work in the long run. However if you'd rather use perl that you already understand, then you can always investigate procmail and just pipe the necessary mails through your program just like you're already doing from STDIN. That's going to be a bit more efficient and a bit less prone to newbie errors than extracting it from a mailbox once the system has delivered it, and has the advantage of also being realtime. `the hatter`	[reply] [d/l]
Re: Handling Incoming Mail by Fastolfe (Vicar) on Dec 12, 2001 at 02:03 UTC
Mail::Audit looks pretty slick. In the past, though, whenever I was doing automated mail handling, I would use MIME::Parser to parse the message, and MIME::Entity to construct a reply.	[reply]


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