Anyway, I have a script that I want to run whenever I receive an email on gmail. And if possible a subject specific email. is such a thing possible and if so, what programs do I need to allow it.
You can't instruct gmail to trigger an external script for you. I think you've got a few basic choices. In order of increasing difficulty and complexity:
1) Configure a gmail filter to deliver your desired messages to a special folder. Write a script to poll that folder, download (or delete or mark as read) messages it finds there, and then launch your local script. Set up a cron on your local machine to run the script every few minutes. You can poll the folder with IMAP or the GMAIL API. IMAP is probably easier. This will be tricky with shell, you're better of with Python, PHP, or similar.
2) Configure a gmail filter to forward your desired messages to an address on a mail server that you control. Use procmail or similar to intercept the incoming messages and launch your script.
3) Set up an account at Mailgun and configure the emails so they get delivered there directly. (Or forward from gmail as in #2.) Configure Mailgun to launch an API request when it receives messages. Build an API handler to receive the request. Launch your process from your API handler.
I have never done it, but I guess the first thing you should do is to take a look at the Google's Gmail API...
What is the Gmail API?
The Gmail API gives you flexible, RESTful access to the user's inbox,
with a natural interface to Threads, Messages, Labels, Drafts, and
History.
It seems to fit what you want - at least, without knowing the details of what you want to do.
The Gmail API can be used in a variety of different applications,
including, typically:
Read-only mail extraction, indexing, and backup
Label management
(add/remove labels)
Automated or programmatic message sending
You can use several programming languages - maybe the trick is using your programming language of choice to write a wrapper for the .sh script... I hope this helps!
Related
I found a similar question from 2016, however at that time Gmail itself did not support scheduled sending of emails.
Now that you can schedule messages to send later directly from Gmail, I was wondering if there was a way to do it with their API.
Interestingly, scheduled emails appear as message objects when calling messages.list, but they do not contain any labels.
Any help would be appreciated! And if it's not possible at the moment, it would be awesome to get a reply from someone at Google about when this will become possible (I believe they officially endorse the gmail-api tag to StackOverflow)
I don't think a time-based trigger will work--even if you write the code to store email send data and then build something that regularly checks whether it's time for an email to be sent. See Google's documentation on triggers, and you'll notice that time-based triggers aren't available for Gmail scripts.
Unfortunately, there is no Gmail API endpoint for scheduling the sending of emails directly.
One workaround would be to write a script in Google Apps Script (https://script.google.com) which handles the composing of the email you wish to send, as well as a function to send the mail via the API. You can then use the built-in 'Apps Script Project Triggers' feature to trigger the function to run on a schedule; for example on action/event or at a specific/repeated time.
Button for adding trigger to Apps Script
We are developing a big data solution in which one requirement is to process incoming emails. The technology stack is not finalized yet but mostly we might go with Sendmail as MTA and Procmail as MDA. We are open to any other very efficient solution.
These emails are essentially carry data in attachments and are not meant for end user, so the email flow ends with Spark processing.
My first thought was it would be great if there was a message queuing system such as Apache-Kafka which could accept emails as messages and then provide them to the client such as Spark on demand but it seems that sort of technology/approach is not available in any of the message brokering systems.
This means we would have to receive emails via SMTP MTA and then extract the information from the MDA.
We could use Procmail to extract the contents of the email and the attachments and put them in a folder per email and then scan the folders and process them in spark.
Alternatively if Spark has any plugins which could pull in emails from an MDA and break it down into it's attachments it would make life much simpler.
If there is any other smarter solution it would be welcome.
So the fundamental question is what technology is available for channelizing emails through Spark for processing. Connectors etc.
Mailgun or Sendgrid incoming email processing is so easy that I could hardly imagine any alternative for a new, especially big, system. I only played with them, but my impression was that my any actual or potential (billions of emails) problem related to emails is solved for good. Not related to Spark, those system just post email content as http POST request to a URL you provide.
Sendgrid used to incorrectly parse encoding, their support ignored my emails and eventually deleted a ticket without solving the problem. Mailgun always returns UTF8 regardless of original encoding. Manual MIME parsing is such a grandiose task itself so it is better to use existing solutions, unless emails are generated by a computer. But even then, IaaS services are so much cheaper than developer time.
Old days many admins use sms-gates for sending important informations from their systems e.g. "Power down, UPS is working now!", "Power Up, UPS is off!" or "CPU Temp too high!". Today in Facebook era we use messenger instead of SMS, so I wonder if I could create a command-line bash or php script for such thing.
The idea - cron checks every 10 minutes the condition and if it is true, sends message to my messenger.
The issues:
I don't want to use my fb account for sending - I'd like to get message
from "System 1", "System 2", because i have more than one system to
admin.
The bash part is easy for me, I need tips for Facebook solutions:
do I have to get FacebookAppId (and do I have to create AppId for
each system or just one AppId)
how to "join/confirm/accept" "System 1" account with my Facebook Account
is it possible to send messages to more than one FBAccount
any other hints what should i look for.
I found Notification App, but i think that it doesn't send message to messenger, so it would be useless.
The Chat API was removed with v2.0 of the Graph API, there is no way to send messages with an API anymore. Btw, messages are for communcation between real users, they should not be used as notification system anyway. SMS is still a good option for those kind of warnings imho.
Using a Page and the /conversations endpoint would not work either:
Pages can only reply to a message - they cannot initiate a conversation. Also, a Page can only respond twice to a particular message, the other party will have to respond before they can reply again.
Source: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v2.3/conversation/messages#publish
I think for your special purpose, twitter may be a better option. Twitter accepts tweets from API. So what you need to do is to set up an account to publish your system status either regularly or event-triggingly and follow it in your own personal account.
And there are already plenty of open source projects focusing on tweeting via API, and t is the one I am currently using.
So there are a couple of command line apps to do this.
There is a libpurple extension (https://github.com/dequis/purple-facebook) which works. However purple doesn't seem to support the idea of message history. This is a shame since I imagine offline messages is the default way most people use facebook.
There is an single use command tool for facebook as well: https://www.npmjs.com/package/fb-messenger-cli which does support history. Unfortunately this is a TUI rather than a command line application and doesn't seem to depend on a separate facebook library.
Some hacking or terrible expect glue could work around this.
I just published a service exactly for that use case :
https://www.nimrod-messenger.io/
It's at an early stage. Feedbacks are more than welcome :-)
Sending facebook message in bash script
IDEA
I needed a script (which work on my work/local mac) that checks server. If there are problems, script will send me messages on Facebook.
Dependencies
need to install: https://github.com/mjkaufer/Messer
Solution, bash script
FB_SENDER_LOGIN=""
FB_SENDER_PASSWORD=""
function send_fb_message {
FB_MESSER_COMAND="messer $FB_SENDER_LOGIN $FB_SENDER_PASSWORD --command='m \"$1\" $2'"
eval "$FB_MESSER_COMAND"
}
RECIPIENT_NAME_DISPLAYED_IN_FACEBOOK_WEBSITE="Vasily Bodnarchuk"
MESSAGE="Houston, we have a problem!!!"
send_fb_message "$RECIPIENT_NAME_DISPLAYED_IN_FACEBOOK_WEBSITE" "$MESSAGE"
Automated Facebook message
I was looking for something like this exactly and found that Messer is the way to go.
Solution
Look at this repo called Messer https://github.com/mjkaufer/Messer
(it works with 2FA too but not with app passwords)
Implementation
See Readme
I needed it to run automatically so I used it's non-interactive mode with a bash script:
message="Hey, what\'s up bro"
FULLPATH/node_modules/.bin/messer --command="m \"Myfriends Name\" $message"
I don't like to install something like this globally through NPM so I used the /node_modules/.bin/messer executable in the project's folder.
Used double quotes escaped instead of single quotes to be able to use variables inside command.
Drawback: Messer can only send, not receive.
I have a ticket system in PHP. People report tickets over email. A mail parser connects to the mailbox using IMAP, downloads the email and parses it to create a ticket which can be viewed/updated over the web interface.
Now I want my application to check if the downloaded mail is a spam before it creates a ticket out of the mail. So I thought of integrating spamassassin. The docs say, it can be implemented as a proxy. I am not sure how to do this.
Basically what I want is a way to pass the email as a string to the spamassassin perl script which validates the mail?
Has anybody done something similar before. Can you suggest some other related good tools?
Edit: I am using Google apps mail-server. So its not an option to integrate SpamAssassin at the MTA or MDA stage.
Can you install spamassassin in your webserver? because spamassassin supports pipes. you can make a syscall from php to use spamassassin from command line and parse the answer. Or you can use this http://ppadron.blog.br/2010/05/04/php-api-to-spamassassin-spamd-protocol/ Or you can use a reliable antispam service for your domain.
I am developing a website -- in the prototype stage, soon to be alpha. I will provide an email address to each account that allows the user to deposit stuff -- not a real email account, just an endpoint for sending things to the site. Many sites provide this kind of service nowadays. I think the first one I saw was Photobucket, which let's you send photos as email attachments.
My question is, what is the best way to implement this kind of service?
In my prototype, I have written a POP3 client which fetches all newly delivered mail (currently from a test Gmail account). My service processes each new mail and attachments, and immediately removes it from the email server.
I could certainly outsource to an email service with POP3 and be done with it. The problem is cost. Most services I have seen provide much more than I need, and they charge per account. I expect to have many accounts and low traffic volume.
So I'm leaning towards hosting email receipt myself. I am open to Windows or Linux. The code that processes incoming emails runs on Windows, but I have other services running on Linux. I have seen a number of open source and free email servers, such as hMailServer and MailEnable (Windows) and qmail, Postfix and exim (Linux).
I guess I have a slight preference towards Linux because of lower hosting costs, but if a Windows service can provide cleaner integration, that might be worth it. As far as features, I would like to have some spam filtering, but it's is not a huge priority. POP3 is adequate for retrieval, but a more direct API would be nice. I will need some kind of API for programmatically provisioning new accounts.
All suggestions are appreciated. Do you know how others implement this kind of service?
UPDATE: I ended up using hMailServer, which is a free mail server that runs on Windows. It seems to be quite mature and robust. It has a COM interop library which makes accessing emails, accounts, etc. from my .NET server app very easy indeed.
If you're going the host-your-own-email-server route, I would probably just use POSTFIX and pipe all your email to a PHP script, which processes the email.
Here's a quick'n dirty tutorial on setting up the email pipe if you're using cPanel:
http://kb.siteground.com/article/How_to_pipe_an_email_to_a_PHP_script.html
If not, here's how to do it:
http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=562518
The bottom line is, you need to have an open SMTP connection to accept email. If you have your own server, then you can install a SMTP server on the machine. Usually, you have filesystem access to the location the email files are placed. Be sure to select a SMTP server that allows this, and that the email are in a format that you can parse.
Then, you can just monitor the file location for incoming emails.
If you can't pipe your emails (using the Postfix suggestion), and you don't have your own server (for example, on a shared hosting plan), then you will need to query a POP3 or IMAP mailbox server for your emails, and parse them accordingly.
I wanted to get emails in real time so I worked out my own solution with google app engine. I basically made a small dedicated google app engine app to receive and POST emails to my main site. That way I could avoid having to set up an email server.
You can check out Emailization (a little weekend project I did to do it for you), or you this small GAE app that should do the trick.
I kinda explained it more on another question.
Hope that helps!