Hi,

I'm looking to find a solution to the folowing problem, so far I haven't found any software that will cope with all the requirements so I have resigned myself to the idea of having to write php scripts which are triggered by incoming email messages to a sendmail (or other linux based mail server).

I have a customer who has 2000 domains (each with only a handful of email users).

The end users themselves don't read the email, all incoming email for each account is bounced onto an email to fax service, they only see the faxes.

The main problems we are seeing as we bring the domains on board ( 300 so far ) is that replies from the customers are sent back from their fax machines to the fax number held for the email to fax account, therefore any inbound emails from efax.com must be from our customers and need to have the attached pdf inspected to decide who the end recipient is (this is OK they are using us as a bureau service). I have not been able to find any hosting accounts that will allow you to specify the redirects based on the sending email address.

The next problem is that the email adddresses in the pdf isn't always clear so sometimes get sent to a wrong recipient which will usually genreate a bounce message, if this bounce sin't trapped it causes a 40 page fax to come out at the custmoers end (they don't like that ;0) )

So this far the system is being managed by multiple pop3 mail accounts being pulled into outlook, then rulles being set in Outlook to bounce the incoming mails onto the efax service unless of course they are on the list of bounce addresses we have collected or they are from efax.com (because these would be from customers and need sending on)

My thought at the moment is to create a mysql database to hold the email addresses and the forwading efax email addresses for each one, along with a 'black list' of bounce addresses. Then write a php script to hook into the mailserver and get that to fire on each incoming messge. This would then lookup agains t the database and decide where to bounce messages onto, emails from efax.com could be sent to one central email account to be checked and sent on and bounces would be sent to another admin account so that they could be checked.


If anyone is aware of a linux application that will already handle this type of scenario then please yell, like wise ayone with any suggestons on how to put this all togehter i.e. which is the best mail server app to use etc etc, I'd love to hear from you.

Daniel

Hello there and welcome to LQ, hope you like it here.

I think it's an interesting challenge. My first idea was to suggest to swap the whole
thing for Fetchmail + procmail routing, no functionality problem there, only more robust and less vulnerable. Inspecting PDF's, as long as they are well formatted and not encrypted, should be no problem too. But since you mentioned using databases maybe not reinvent the (whole) wheel and read http://www.onlamp.com/lpt/a/5005 for idea's which leads to http://www.dbmail.org/ of which http://www.inter7.com/index.php?page=eps or http://jem.sourceforge.net/ maybe could be framework alternatives, I don't know. Just my thoughts.