Client asked this morning if we can provide a subscription service whereby:
Mail arives to a specific address on a cloud mail server with no procmail/maildrop possibilities
Cron runs Perl or PHP script on another server which checks for new mail and based on address mail purports to be from, does a subscriber look up, and forwards the email with any attachments to all subscribers along with an added unsubscribe link
Script deletes forwarded email
Mail server will have both IMAP and POP access, apparently.
// EDIT
Note that mail will be from 220+ governmental agencies/organizations. Users will use interface to specify which organizations they wish to receive forwards from. In order to run like a traditional mailing list we'd have to set up 200 mailing lists and then make an interface to handle subscriptions. The proposed interface will allow 1 - 200 subscriptions with a single opt-in confirmation email and a single opt-out interface.
// END EDIT
Client has been warned that header spoofing is child's play and that viral attachments are a serious concern and is willing to proceed nonetheless.
So, with the caveat that this is NOT an idea that I endorse what libraries have you used to accomplish this sort of task?
You do not mention what kind of mail server you are dealing with. Perl has Net::IMAP::Client and Net::POP3 to handle fetching mail.
For sending email using an SMTP server, there is Email::Sender or Net::SMTP or Net::SMTP::SSL.
At a minimum, you'll need an email account which you can use to send emails (this might be the original account that receives the messages).
In between fetching and sending, you can check for spam using Spam Assassin and for viruses using ClamAV.
I don't know why the original messages need to be deleted, but at the very least, I would log every single step in detail.
What you're describing is a mailing list. If at all possible, you should look into using one of the several existing software packages designed for managing such lists, such as majordomo, ezmlm or mailman, rather than trying to roll your own.
Related
I want to create a system, where an email is sent to me using smtp and i perform all the validation and some manipulations in HTML. and then send it using SMTP.
Currently i have some applications which are using SMTP as email sender, i want to create a simple layer in between them so that all the emails are sent from this filter, so that i can edit HTML source code and add some tracking links or check weather to send this email or not, depending on the spam and other filters.
This is a great PHP framework for sending emails, its supposedly very difficult to send emails from within PHP its self using the mail() function.
Are you trying to import an email sent from a specific address to you, extract data from that email and then forward the information on? Can we get an example of the email you are trying to extract/manipulate? I feel some more information on the task at hand would make this easier!
EDIT
So if understand correctly you want to program an application that all your other applications interface with and send emails from this new application?
If so there is lots of ways you could do this, I'm not aware of any github solutions (Correct me if I'm wrong) & I don't think any sort of SMTP service offers what you are asking (HTML changing being the big problem I'd imagine).
So what you could do is write an application with an API (referring which application sent the request, desired recipient, email template to use ETC) with all of your different settings/spam filter restrictions stored in database. You could then keep your emails all in a folder within the new application and when you amend them they get sent out.
Another solution would be to create a folder that contained all of the email templates, then create system links (securing X,Y&Z attack vectors) to your different PHP projects which depend on these email templates and do per application filtering (Spam/HTML Changes).
I'm in need of setting up an auto-response from an email account that I control, based on trigger words within the body of the email. But also, it needs to add/delete rows from a database table based on trigger words sent to this email account (that belongs to my site) and it needs to create a topic, in some cases, within a forum, if sent to a different email address (but on the same server). I know PHP to be able to do this, but not really sure how to trigger a PHP script to be executed when an email gets sent to a specific email address account that I control. Or if there is another solution to accomplish this, please let me know.
This is basically an inquiry on how to accomplish something like this, based on an email sent to a specific email address on my server with words like: "Join", "Leave", "Set Mail", "Set Digest", etc. etc.
There will be another email address account set aside that will need to send those subscribers in the database, the same exact email (Mass Send). This is for a CDB-L ListServ. Kind of old school I suppose, but we want to transfer this ability to our server, since these old school methods still work today and is very much active.
Curious on security issues, what type of server software I'll need and just a basic approach on how to set something like this up.
You can alias your email address directly to a php script if you run your own mail server (on linux this would just be in the /etc/alias file or equivalent where the target was your php script instead of an email address) eg http://www.topwebhosts.org/bbs/board.php?bo_table=server_mgmt&wr_id=73
If not, then your only real choice is to set up a php process that checks an email address for mail every x minutes.
I have used both these methods over the years to great success
You can walk through emails with PHP's IMAP functions and undertake action (based on conditions/content). More info.
I looking into building a system that can read and send mails all by itself.
The mailserver already exists. All I want to do is fetch the e mail data with a php script running locally on the mailserver, store some of the data in an external database.
Then when an "event" is raised, I want to run a php script that get's some data out of the database, create a mail , and send it through the mail server.
I'm fairly new to this, so I hope the things I say make sense.
Here's my question: Is it secure enough to work this way?
Am I doing anything against "the rules" ?
Thanks
There is nothing wrong in doing the things this way. Its not against the rule. But Email Deliverability is not guaranteed because:
There is no guarantee that the email you send will pass the spam filters of email providers.
Number of emails you send to 1 user in a day, Any spam keyword in the mail content, user marking your email as spam etc.
Basically, there are n number of reasons why your mail server might get blacklisted by email providers.
To ensure Email Deliverability, you need to get your mail server IP whitelisted with all the email providers. (which is not easy)
I would suggest you to use bulk email sending third party solutions like Sendgrid, Madmimi, etc.
Refer: Discussion on choosing email sending service
Also, these services also gives statistics like open tracking, click tracking etc...
We are developing a email web site.but we are facing problem in receiving and validating the mail.i have the following doubts.can you please help me in clarifying these???
one more important thing is we are not using squrrelmail, qmail etc.
how do we receive emails for users in email web site?
do we save all the received emails in admin's mail box or in database as per the username
(my idea on email web site is,all the incoming mail are stored in admin's mail box and after the email mail is stored in database,and then the mail deleted in admin's mail box.Is it correct.if not how to store the emails in database directly in web site)
what is the technique behind the receiving mail???i think there are various techniques like email piping etc.
is there any special process of creating users for email web site,i mean do we need to create mailbox(i think mail account) for each user at the time of registration.if we need to create mail box for user,can we create it with imap_createmailbox() function.
are the users gmail,yahoomail etc are accessig database or their mail accounts at the time their login??
can we do all these things with imap functions in php??
There are many different solutions to this problem, polling existing servers, adding scripts to run when a message is received or using a gateway like CloudMailin. I wrote a blog post relating to this (it's for rails but almost all applies to php too).
The other problems almost all span from how you setup the first thing. In many cases you could just log the emails directly to your database and retrive them based on the recipient address. I think you need to explain exactly what you want to do with the email? Are you just providing email hosting for your users or are you providing an additional service? If you're just providing hosting then there are simpler approaches available.
I am helping re-code a website that allows teachers to text message/email their students about upcoming new/assignments. Students can subscribe to their teacher's notifications by texting/emailing a flag to the inbox.
How would I go about watching these inbox's for incoming messages, to then flag php procedures (using cpanel scripts to interact with the email system)?
**If any more information is needed from me to make this more clear, please post.*
To handle incoming emails using PHP you will need to "pipe" the emails to a script.
Email Piping with Cpanel
Simple Email Logger Using cPanel’s Pipe Forwarder
But, if you are specifically wanting to manage a Newsletter/Mailing List, then you may also want to look at something like PHPList as you may need to satisfy legal requirements for handling OptIn/OptOut, etc. actions.