[Zope] Zope-mail gateway

Jay, Dylan djay@lucent.com
Wed, 11 Aug 1999 16:19:15 +1000


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Hannu Krosing [mailto:hannu@trust.ee]
> Sent: Wednesday, August 11, 1999 16:17
> To: Jay, Dylan
> Cc: 'zope@zope.org'
> Subject: Re: [Zope] Zope-mail gateway
> 
> 
> "Jay, Dylan" wrote:
> > 
> > Zope acts as a publishing medium between documents that can 
> be rendered on
> > the server side and clients. So far there is http, ftp, 
> webdav etc as
> > protocols for this interaction. How about mail? I send a 
> mail. It gets
> > mapped to a zope object somehow.
> 
> I guess you could put something like "|
> add_may_mail_to_right_zope_folder" 
> into your .forward file and then have a simple (?) program 
> that submits
> the 
> incoming mail to zope. It can either un-mime the mail itself or submit
> it as
> one big chunk and have zope external methods do the work of splitting
> the 
> parts, decoding and saving with appropriate mime type

I'm not really looking for a way of implementing this now. What I'm trying
to say is that I think there would be a need for a closer intergration of
mail and web and zope is a perfect candidate. At the moment email processing
is not a cross platform buisness. Procmail I think can do smart things with
email on unix. On NT you might have to write some scripts into the bowels of
an exchange server. In either case you might want to access the same kinds
of user info or other databases to process the mail. Wouldn't it be nice if
you can just email a web page and get a response. Wouldn't it be nice if
this was enabled by simply installing a Zope product. My point is that I
don't want to be screwing with .forward files and procmail etc. I want to
specify that email to this address gets sent to this zope object. In its
simplest form you could have a mapping to a whole site such that sending a
mail to Download/Contrib@zope.org gets me that page sent back to me.

 
> > This object gets rendered and sent back.
> 
> To send something back is easy - just use MailHost.
> 
> > Zope could support smtp or it could use pop polling.
> 
> Supporting SMTP directly is probably a bad idea for current (1.10.x) 
> unthreaded servers as mail could be arraiving real slow. 
> The technique described above is the equivalent of using apache with
> (p)cgi.
> 
> > Using it as a list server it would probably inefficient but for 
> > processing email forms etc it would be very cool.
> 
> With ZCatalog it would also make a nice searchable mail storage.
> 
> -----
> Hannu
>