Re: Mail client - run a program when receive an email

On Wed, 10 Nov 2004, Hardy Merrill wrote:

Comments below.

--- "Scot L. Harris" <webid@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Wed, 2004-11-10 at 12:46, Hardy Merrill wrote:

For every email I receive I'd like to run a

program

and have the program have access to the data in

the

email. It's been a while since I've used email on

Red

Hat/Fedora (I got lazy and have been using yahoo

mail)

- I used to use mutt with fetchmail and procmail

but

never used that combination for anything like

this.

Can it do that? Can procmail kick off a program

and

give the program the contents of the mail as

input?

What other email clients can do that? Can

evolution?

Do you want the program to modify the email and pass
it on or just
analyze data in the email?

I'm thinking of creating a football pool email app - I
know this has probably been done a thousand times
before, but I'd like to do it myself just for fun.

My thought is to send members of the pool an email
listing all the games, and having each member respond
to the email with their picks.  My app would take in
each email and run a script - the script would parse
the email and ... etc.

So the answer to your question is I just need the
script to analyze the email - at this point I don't
think the script needs to modify the email nor pass it
on.  Actually, I do want the email "filtered" (or
sent) to a "football pool" mail box, so the
requirement is:
  1. pipe email to script, and
  2. send email to a specific mailbox

that really is the sort of thing you do in procmail.

take a look at man procmail and man procmailrc and look at the procmailex man page as well.

something like:

:0:
* ^Subject:.*football
football_pool

would deliver mails containing the subject including the word football to the football_pool folder...

I plan to install and try Evolution.  If I can't get
that to work I'll go the fetchmail/procmail/perl
script/mutt route.

Thanks!

Hardy

If you want to modify the message and pass it along
in it's modified
form then you probably want to look at using
procmail.  There are many
things you can do to a message in procmail including
modifying headers
and piping the message through another script or
program.  You can even
pass just the headers or the body of the message to
the pipe or the
whole thing.

In evolution you can pipe the message to a an
external script or program
(such as spamassassin) but it will only get a return
code, you can not
modify the content of the message through evolution
filters.

--
Scot L. Harris
webid@xxxxxxxxxx

If you would understand your own age, read the works
of fiction produced
in it.  People in disguise speak freely.

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