E-mail Piping – Integrating your mailbox with your web application.
by Michael Craig on 13/11/09 at 3:28 pm
E-mail Piping is the process of passing the contents of an email as an input-variable to a script or a program on your webserver.
For example, with e-mail piping you can do things like:
- allow mobile users to upload photos or videos to your website from their cellphones
- send an auto response
- submit help desk ticket
- subscribe the sender to a newsletter
- spam filtering etc.
E-mail piping usually follows the following technique:
- execute the program every time an email arrives for a predefined recipient (e.g. uploads@company.com), and
- send the message content to the program’s standard input (in other words, to simulate typing of the entire message through the keyboard)
How To Setup Email Piping
Placing .forward, .qmail-default, .procmailrc files to your mailman’s directory
If you have access to your sever’s shell, log-in to your servers root and create the following file depending on your servers email program:
This example is specific to Qmail
Filename: .qmail-{username}, ie .qmail-default, .qmail-support, .qmail-info
Place the file in the following location
/var/qmail/mailnames/yourdomain.com/.qmail-support
The file contents should contain a “pipe” (|) along with the script to pipe the information to.
|/home/path/to/your/script.php
Restart Qmail
/etc/init.d/qmail restart