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Comment by sourc3 | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone here point me to a library/framework that would allow for monitoring incoming emails (similar to this scenario) and take actions based on email address it was sent to?

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There are quite a few ways you can accomplish this with Linux + Postfix (other MTAs too) but since you have specific email addresses you want to process mail for as in this scenario the quickest way would be to have an alias[1] pipe to it to your script (language agnostic in this case). You can even use a .forward file, which might even work in the case of shared hosting.

A quick example of this for Perl is http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1030830 (replace the perl script with any program)

Another way would be to setup a transport map that targets a hook that you setup in your master.cf file but it's probably best to find more tutorials online to understand everything that is taking place.

1. If your domain is using a virtual alias then point the virtual domain's recipient to the alias.

You guys are great. Since we are building a SaaS product using a service is a good option to get us going but eventually we want to have this function in-house. I will check out all the pointers here (both service + custom solution). Thanks a lot!

On the Python side there's Lamson and Google App Engine also has nice email handling capabilities allowing you to parse and access from your own code / app.

http://lamsonproject.org/ https://developers.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/

Looks pretty good, I will check this out in more detail! It looks like a common enough problem that I thought there would be mature frameworks around. I keep finding myself looking for a solution like this for most of my side projects..

We're using Mandrill - inbound email to boards.trello.com is routed to them, they parse the email into JSON, and then they POST data to us. They do spf/dkim validation for us in addition to the parsing. That said, that might be a bit heavy for your use-case.

Check out Mailgun: http://www.mailgun.com/ . It's a service rather than a library, but it handles incoming emails and has wrapper libraries in a number of languages.

We use Mailgun (Mailgun Routes) at our startup to handle email sent into the application. It works fantastic - it POSTs the email neatly structured into To, From, CC, Subject, Body etc fields and also extracts the text of the email from the Body without the signature and the quoted text which is invaluable (and isn't done by other services such as Sendgrid, Postmark, AWS etc).

Not sure of a library that would let you do it, but maybe a mail server with rules that would get triggered on mail receive. Pretty sure you can run custom scripts on a postfix server based on email content.

Postmark is one I've used in the past that has an incoming mail API (in addition to outbound) that hits an endpoint you set with email data already processed for you, attachments included.

Are you language-agnostic? Ruby's mailman gem is good.

Yes, I am language agnostic. I was leaning towards Python/Ruby solutions. I will check out mailman. Thank you.

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