(Sorry if this is the wrong forum...)

I have a server that is sending out automated emails for a website. This is working fine. However, the powers-that-be want any undeliverable email to be flagged, and pertinent information pulled out of the message and put in a database for report generation.

My question is: is there a way to parse through received mail, search for strings, perform actions based on whether or not those strings exist, and delete all parsed messages after they've been processed?

I know I can grep through the appropriate mail spool in /var/spool/mail, but I'm nervous about trying to edit that file. I'd be less nervous editing a user's mbox file, but I don't know how to move mail from the spool to this file without actively reading it.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

matt
(fiservguy)

Set up some sort of mail delivery system on your local box. Preferrably to an mbox. Then you can use grep and sed to extract your needed information. Or, if you use qmail or something similar, you can use the .qmail file feature of redirection to a program. I'm pretty sure other MTAs offer similar functionality.

This is a tough one. What I would probably do is create a script that does the desired actions you want and run it through cron however often you want to check for these undelivered emails.

As for the scripting language to go with I would use either Perl or Python. Both can do the desired actions you want. You'll have to get good at regular expressions to parse through the contents of the mail file. I'm not sure what strings you would be looking for but pretty much anything can be done with regular expressions. Also, both languages have the ability to write to a database(i.e. mysql) and the ability to edit text files.

Am I way off base here?

Matir,

Thanks for the quick reply. Sendmail is loaded on the box in question; how can I (can I?) send just the mail for the user in question to a file? Would this be a sendmail.cf/mc setting or a .mailrc setting?

Crashed_Again,

You've described what I plan on doing. I just need some suggestions in how to get started. I've been boning up on my regular expressions, and I'm building a test file to play with to make sure I'm extracting what I need. Unfortunately, I'm a relatively new programmer, so this will be an exciting experience for me.

Thanks again for the quick responses.

hi guys,

i may have a similar problem,

i need my qmail mail server to call my php script file whenever it receives a bounced email.

how do i configure it to receives bounce email and then call my php file?

thanks

I ulitimately went with a cron job that searches the mail file for certain keywords (specifically SMTP error codes), then extracts the pertinant information.

Set your job to run often enough and it can be "near real time" I suppose.

fiservguy

One thing, if I may suggest it: You might consider using a small app called 'getmail' to retrieve the mail from the server to a different location than where your 'live' email folder is. You just simply instruct getmail to not delete the messages from the server, so that sendmail or whatever can still get them. This way, you can have your own copy of the messages, and not have to mess with the live messages. You can then set up a cronjob and a script (PHP, Perl, Python, etc) to parse your messages, looking for bounces, recording them to whatever database you are using.

You could create a .forward file in the user's home directory and grab the incoming email that way.

Example:
Replace "username" with the actual username that will be receiving the email.

The above .forward file does two things, [1] it sends incoming mail to the default destination (that's the "\username" directive before the comma) and [2] if sends a copy of the incoming mail to the STDIN of "/path/to/a/parser/program" The parser program is invoked for every new incoming email.

I have used the above technique with sendmail on Solaris, I assume it would work with other mail transport agents on Linux (you'd have to try it).