UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hello all!

I'm looking to setup some sort of script so that when a an email comes in from a specific address the message and/or attachments are automatically printed.

Any ideas on where to start?

Thanks for the help.

Can you please provide some additional details - what mail agent are you using? O/S version?

I was hoping to set this up on a mail server so I didn't need a larger program but if need be I could use thunderbird. This will be running on Ubuntu 11.10 32-bit.

You could use the fetchmail utility to automatically retrieve mail from a mailbox at intervals. Or if you have your own mailserver, just have the mail delivered into a maildir for your script to check.

Once there, mail files are text. Printing text mail isn't too difficult, pipe it into your mail daemon. Filter it as you please to get the fields you want.

Attachments are a little harder. What about .jpg? what about .wmv? what about excel spreadsheets?

You might need to narrow the problem a little.

Ok, here is the problem I'm trying to solve. Mom has Blackberry that she gets her work email on and the way she has me printing the messages/attachments now is sending the email to her personal email and then having me print them out. I want to have her send it to an email server setup on this box or pulled from an outside source. I don't have a lot of experience in the scripting department so I will need help with that.

Thanks for being clear.

Again, though -- what sort of attachments? If she's wanting you to print ecards full of embedded pictures and dancing baloney I don't think much but a full-out GUI app could handle them.

There's the blackberry remote print app, but if she's sending things to you I suppose her blackberry can't understand them anyway...

The attachments would most likely be doc docs xls xlsx jpg PNG and PDF.