How many times have you had to consume some sort of POP3, IMAP, or local mailbox for incoming content, or had to otherwise construct an application driven by e-mail? One too many times, I'm sure.
This small Django application will allow you to specify mailboxes that you would like consumed for incoming content; the e-mail will be stored, and you can process it at will (or, if you're in a hurry, by subscribing to a signal).
Most mailboxes these days are SSL-enabled; if yours is, add ``+ssl`` to your URI. Also, if your username or password include any non-ascii characters, they should be URL-encoded (for example, if your username includes an ``@``, it should be changed to ``%40`` in your URI).
If you have an account named ``youremailaddress@gmail.com`` with a password of ``1234`` on GMail (which I happen to know uses the POP3 server of 'pop.gmail.com' and requires SSL), you would enter the following as your URI::
If you happen to want to consume a file-based mailbox like an Maildir, Mbox, Babyl, MH, or MMDF mailbox, you can use this too by entering the appropriate 'protocol' in the URI. If you had a maildir, for example, at ``/var/mail/``, you would enter a URI like::
If you are utilizing one of the polling methods above, you will need to periodically poll the mailbox for messages using one of the below methods. If you are receiving mail directly from a mailserver via a pipe (using the ``processincomingmessage`` management command), you need not concern yourself with this section.
You can easily consume incoming mail by running the management command named ``getmail`` (optionally with an argument of the name of the mailbox you'd like to get the mail for).::
Django Mailbox's ``processincomingmessage`` management command accepts, via ``stdin``, incoming messages. You can configure Postfix or Exim4 to pipe incoming mail to this management command to import messages directly without polling. You need not configure mailbox settings when piping-in messages, mailbox entries will be automatically created matching the e-mail address to which incoming messages are sent, but if you would like to specify the mailbox name, you may provide a single argument to the ``processincmingmessage`` command specifying the name of the mailbox you would like it to use (and, if neccessary, create).
Make sure that the e-mail addresses you would like handled by Django Mailbox are not handled by another router; you may need to disable some existing routers.
Change the contents of ``local_parts`` to match a colon-delimited list of usernames for which you would like to receive mail for. For example, if one of the e-mail addresses targeted at this machine is ``jane@example.com``, the contents of ``local_parts`` would be, simply ``jane``.
Like your router configuration, transport configuration should be altered to match your environment. First, modify the ``command`` setting such that it points at the proper python executable (if you're using a virtual environment, you'll want to direct that at the python executable in your virtual environment) and project ``manage.py`` script. Additionally, you'll need to set ``user`` and ``group`` such that they match a reasonable user and group (on Ubuntu, ``www-data`` suffices for both).
Although I have not personally tried using Postfix for this, Postfix is capable of delivering new mail to a script using ``pipe``. Please consult the `Postfix documentation for pipe here <http://www.postfix.org/pipe.8.html>`_. You may want to consult the above Exim4 configuration for tips.
Subscribing to the incoming mail signal
=======================================
To subscribe to the incoming mail signal, following this lead::
from django_mailbox.signals import message_received
from django.dispatch import receiver
@receiver(message_received)
def dance_jig(sender, message, **args):
print "I just recieved a message titled %s from a mailbox named %s" % (message.subject, message.mailbox.name, )
You can disable mailbox information from being listed in the Django admin by adding a setting named ``DJANGO_MAILBOX_ADMIN_ENABLED`` indicating your preference toward whether or not the models appear in the admin (defaulting to ``True``).
