Install

Instructions for installing ZMailIn.

CMFMailIn instructions found here

Introduction

This is the first final release version of ZMailIn, which allows you to email into Zope. Each email that is sent to a particular address arrives in the Zope environment ready to be processed by your own methods.

Status

This is a release version and is actually in use by NIP. This release has been tested using the eXtreme Programming ( XP ) methodology and NIP's in-house product testing system. It is intended for people who wish to be able to get emails in to their own Zope environment.

We've split the problem into a number of aspects:

Getting the email from the mail system into a world we can program (Python).
Getting the mail into Zope.
Figuring out what to do with the mail once it is in Zope.

As we are targetting Unix (specifically Linux) we can get the MTA (Exim, or Sendmail, or most other MTAs) to send mail for a particular address to a script.

This script then queries a ZCatalog for the location of the ZMailIn Client that has been configured to except messages from an email address. It then communicates with the Zope product (ZMailIn), via http post, and calls one of the Products functions which pulls the mail message in to useful parts before sending it to a specified method.

The setup has been developed and lightly tested using:

Zope 2.4.3 running on Linux (Mandrake 8.1).
Zope 2.5.0 running on Linux (Mandrake 8.1).
Exim 3.14 as the mail transport. You can find more information about Exim at http://www.exim.org/. We believe it should also work with sendmail (the MTA normally found on Linux) but haven't tested it.

ZMailIn is provided as a single tar archive. It contains the ZMailIn Python Products.

Installation

(In the following instructions, Zope_Home means your Zope directory, for example, /usr/local/zope.)

Extract ZMailIn-1-0-0.tgz to your Zope_Home directory using tar zxvf ZMailIn-1-0-0.tgz
Configure the Zope_Home/lib/python/Products/ZMailIn/zopeMailInConf.py file for your server settings.
Change the first line of Zope_Home/lib/python/Products/ZMailIn/zopeMailIn.py to reflect your python location (whereis python).
Make sure your MTA has permission to execute zopeMailIn.py
To check this, try it, for example if your MTA runs as the user mail, do su - mail and then ./zopeMailInPost.py

chmod a+x zopeMailInPost.py should fix any access problems, but don't forget to give your MTA permission to access the directory Zope_Home/lib/python/Products/ZMailIn/ as well.
Make sure your MTA (in our case, Exim) will deliver email to a program. For Exim this means assuming Exim is installed and working you need to:
1. Make sure that pipe transports are enabled.
  Check /etc/exim.conf for a section in transports like:
```
                address_pipe:
                   driver = pipe
                   user = mail
                   return_output
```
  This is usually found in the default exim.conf file. To make ZMailIn work for mailing lists add this line:
```
                  envelope_to_add = true
```
  This forces Exim to add the envelope-to to the headers of the mail message.
2. Make sure that there is a director set up to handle pipes.
  This will be in the same config file in the Directors section and will look something like:
```
                  pipe_transport = address_pipe
```
  Again, this is already present in the default setup.
3. Make sure that local_domains is configured to deliver local mail to the host machine.
  So, if your mail addresses are of the form [email protected] then you should have:
```
                  local_domains = foo.bar.baz
```
4. Restart Exim (this step may not be needed for machines running Sendmail).

In the file /etc/aliases set up the appropriate pipe alias.

For example - a line such as:

           recipient:   "|Zope_Home/lib/python/Products/ZMailIn/zopeMailIn.py"

Restart Zope.
Create a ZMailIn instance in Zope
- Supply the email of the account you will be suppling emails to.
- Supply the id of the method that will deal with message arrivals
Note - Using Mailing Lists:

You must configure your mail program to supply the envelope-to in the headers of the mail message. You must do this for several reasons.
- With a mailing list, the arriving mail will have the following in the to header of the mail, not your address:
```
                       [email protected]
```
- People can send a message to [email protected] and cc or bcc it to [email protected]. This means the to header will contain [email protected]
- The envelope-to header (supplied by your mail server) will always contain your email address. This is important in finding the correct ZMailIn Client.
Create a mailIn Method to handle messages as they arrive in the system. When this method is called there will be an attribute called theMail in the namespace. theMail is a dictionary containing all the information about the mail message, including a dictionary of file attachments.
Alternatively you could use the sample method supplied in sample_zmailin_method.zexp This method will create a ZMailMessage object in the same object manager as the ZMailIn Client with the id of Sample_Email.

If an email of this id already exists then it will return an error.

This is a Python Script so you will need Zope 2.3.0 or higher.

To import this script copy the file sample_zmailin_method.zexp to your Zope_Home/import/ directory and import it in to your Zope instance.

Then simply point your ZMailIn Client at sample_zmailin_method by entering sample_zmailin_method in to the method field.
To test the system send a mail to the above address (for example [email protected]) and it should appear in Zope.

Domain Addresses

ZMailIn will also work for domain address, for example, you can set the ZMailIn Client email address to:

      @mydomain.com

Then that ZMailIn Client will handle every message that it gets given by the MTA that was addressed to that domain.

For example:

      [email protected]
      [email protected]
      [email protected]

You will have to configure your MTA as required.

Support

This was written by a number of people at NIP. For help with this release contact New Information Paradigms Ltd - ZMailIn Support

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