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Full Discussion: How to read email using mailx in shell script or perl
Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting How to read email using mailx in shell script or perl Post 302177263 by quine on Thursday 20th of March 2008 01:27:26 PM
Old 03-20-2008
Perl supports opening pipes to processes as well as files.... so...

open(HNDL, "mailx -args |");

That last character is a PIPE. I don't remember all the args you need (I think mailx by default first gives you only headers, but there is an argument that tells it "just dump the whole mailbox")

So now you can do something like

while (<HNDL>)
{
# do all your parsing code line by line subjects AND bodies
}

close(HNDL);

Now this is WAY over simplified, because after you dump the mailbox you have to execute mailx again like system("mailx -args bla bla bla") or die;
or qx|mailx -args bla bla bla|, etc to DELETE the mail you've just read. But you have to be careful that you don't delete NEW mail that comes into the box while you are reading so count the headers and delete only those perhaps with something like mailx -d1-10 or something like that... Also, I don't know what kind of mail might show up in this box -- could it have attachments, etc.

There is a whole other approach you might find useful... I used to set up special accounts whose only purpose was to receive email of a certain kind, etc. Like we would tell our trading partners to send all X12 data to xyzaccount@myhost.com or what ever... xyzaccount then had a .forward file and the .forward REDIRECTED the email into my perl scripts...

so .forward would be something like "| myscript.pl". Thus everytime mail was received by xyzaccount it would be immediately piped to the script, one mail at a time. No need to open and read the mailbox....

Now one issue there is that sometimes for security reasons sysadmins won't let you FORWARD email to a PROCESS (as opposed to just another address). We had no problem with this since we expected only ONE kind of mail in that account and the first thing myscript.pl would do is make sure that it was the kind of mail we were expecting. If not, we just quit, issue a warning, etc.

quine@sonic.net
 

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LEARN ABOUT DEBIAN

calibre-smtp

CALIBRE-SMTP(1) 						      calibre							   CALIBRE-SMTP(1)

NAME

       calibre-smtp - part of calibre

SYNOPSIS

       calibre-smtp  [options] [from to text]

DESCRIPTION

       Send  mail using the SMTP protocol. calibre-smtp has two modes of operation. In the compose mode you specify from to and text and these are
       used to build and send an email message. In the filter mode, calibre-smtp reads a complete email message from STDIN and sends it.

       text is the body of the email message.  If text is not specified, a complete email message is read from STDIN.  from is the  email  address
       of the sender and to is the email address of the recipient. When a complete email is read from STDIN, from and to are only used in the SMTP
       negotiation, the message headers are not modified.

       Whenever you pass arguments to calibre-smtp that have spaces in them, enclose the arguments in quotation marks.

OPTIONS

       --version
	      show program's version number and exit

       -h, --help
	      show this help message and exit

       -l, --localhost
	      Host name of localhost. Used when connecting to SMTP server.

       -o, --outbox
	      Path to maildir folder to store failed email messages in.

       -f, --fork
	      Fork and deliver message in background. If you use this option, you should also use --outbox to handle delivery failures.

       -t, --timeout
	      Timeout for connection

       -v, --verbose
	      Be more verbose

   COMPOSE MAIL
       Options to compose an email. Ignored if text is not specified

       -a, --attachment
	      File to attach to the email

       -s, --subject
	      Subject of the email

   SMTP RELAY
       Options to use an SMTP relay server to send mail. calibre will try to send the email directly unless --relay is specified.

       -r, --relay
	      An SMTP relay server to use to send mail.

       --port Port to connect to on relay server. Default is to use 465 if encryption method is SSL and 25 otherwise.

       -u, --username
	      Username for relay

       -p, --password
	      Password for relay

       -e, --encryption-method
	      Encryption method to use when connecting to relay. Choices are TLS, SSL and NONE. Default is TLS. WARNING: Choosing NONE	is  highly
	      insecure

SEE ALSO

       The User Manual is available at http://manual.calibre-ebook.com

       Created by Kovid Goyal <kovid@kovidgoyal.net>

calibre-smtp (calibre 0.8.51)					   January 2013 						   CALIBRE-SMTP(1)
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