[Zope] Proposal for mail-in to Zope

[Chris McDonough]

I'm interested in this, although I have a lot on my plate right now and
can't help in development.

I see objects in Zope being able to handle a call to one of their
methods that passes off a chunk of email text and stuffs it in an
attribute for later display or catalog.

I think you should probably start by designing the interface to these
kinds of objects and worry about exactly how you're going to call the
methods that make up the interface later...

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Simon Coles [mailto:simon@nipltd.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, May 31, 2000 11:54 AM
> To: zope@zope.org
> Subject: [Zope] Proposal for mail-in to Zope
> 
> 
> Hi,
> 
> We (NIP - in the form of Chris Withers, Stephen Harrison, and Simon 
> Coles) have put some thought into the question of how to get emails 
> into Zope, and have come up with a design which we thought we'd pass 
> by the list before we start doing something.
> 
> The problem we are trying to solve is basically being to email 
> "something@myserver.me.com" and that email ends up in the Zope ZODB 
> processed in whatever way is appropriate.
> 
> We aren't worried about sending email, that's done well at the 
> moment. We also wanted to keep things as simple and quick as possible 
> :-) This means trying to avoid getting involved with mail systems as 
> much as we can.
> 
> Most MTAs can be setup to pass an email to the stdin of a program. 
> Sendmail will do this, and Exim (http://www.exim.org/) will also pay 
> attention to what that program returns and queue the message for 
> re-try later if it fails. So using Exim, we don't have to get into 
> any messy stuff about queuing mails if the Zope server is down.
> 
> Some alternatives we considered and didn't go for:
> 	- write something in Zope to listen for SMTP 
> connections, effectively
> 	  large portions of an MTA. This would be cool but painful.
> 	- pull mail from a POP or IMAP server. This had the 
> downside that it
> 	  introduced polling into the system (slow) and also 
> required something
> 	  to happen on a schedule, which doesn't happen in Zope yet.
> 
> So:
> 	- Within Exim, use the "pipe" transport to get email 
> for a particular
> 	  host sent to a program on the standard input. If the 
> program called
> 	  returns certain codes then Exim will queue the 
> message and try again.
> 
> 	- This program takes the email message and puts it into 
> Zope, probably
> 	  by calling a DTML Method or something. This would probably be
> 	  configured by objects in the Zope ZODB which say 
> effectively "When
> 	  you get email for this address, then call this Method".
> 
> 	- The DTML Method is responsible for doing the right 
> things to get
> 	  the email message into the ZODB in whatever form is 
> appropriate.
> 
> We haven't yet figured out how to make sure the above mail handling 
> program can find all the relevant configuration documents. Is there 
> some way of efficiently finding all instances of a particular ZClass?
> 
> (Chris W. still isn't sure that's how the configuration will work but 
> that's the plan for the moment, so any thoughts would be appreciated)
> 
> What we'll do is a first version that hard codes everything in the 
> above script and prove the principle of the thing, and then move onto 
> the configuration.
> 
> 
> Does this sound like what people need? Any thoughts, 
> comments, warnings?
> 
> 
> I don't know yet what kind of schedule we'll be able to do this on 
> but drop me a mail and when there's something to play with we'll let 
> you know.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Simon
> -- 
> --------- My opinions are my own, NIP's opinions are theirs ----------
> Simon J. Coles                                 Email: simon@nipltd.com
> New Information Paradigms                  Work Phone: +44 1344 753703
> http://www.nipltd.com/                     Work Fax:   +44 1344 753742
> =============== Life is too precious to take seriously ===============
> 
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