Re: [CentOS] Receive, process and send email

On Sunday 20 September 2009, "CSB" kjcsb@xnet.co.nz wrote:

We wish to do the following:

1. receive an email with an attachment
2. process the email body to get some information from it
3. send an outbound email to an email address based on the information

derived from step 2. The email will include the attachment received in step 1

I'm not sure where to start with this one so any suggestions would be appreciated.

If it's a minor amount of processing, you can just pipe it to a script from procmail or even straight from the MTA. I don't really like that mechanism though - too prone to produce bounces in the case of long processing times or errors. It's better to dump them in a Maildir and use it as a queue for a polling script.

Perl in particular has a bunch of libraries available to correctly parse MIME messages and extract addresses and attachments and stuff. Don't write your own parser.