Question

I have a Flask web application running behind gunicorn and Nginx. Nginx proxies any traffic to mysite.org to the correct flask app.

I would very much like to use inbox.py to process some incoming email. But running inbox.py’s example on my server and then sending an email to [e-mail] does not work as I intended. The inbox.py server does not seem to receive anything, but the email also does not bounce.

I’m missing something conceptually — is there a DNS setting I need to configure or something I need to adjust with Nginx?

Answer 1

The short answer is to read up on how e-mail (and DNS) works and look into e-mail hosting for mysite.org.
See one of following links on e-mail:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email
• http://computer.howstuffworks.com/e-mail-messaging/email.htm
• http://www.niso.org/khelp/kmlm/user_help/html/how_email_works.html

A longer answer is:
For e-mail to work, it is dependent on name resolution, and mail servers (SMTP server and possibly MDA server [e.g. POP3, IMAP]). For mail to be delivered to mysite.org, there has to be an authoritative dns server for mysite.org with MX records pointing to a server accepting e-mail for mysite.org domain (or a server named mysite.org that is running a mail server).

I’m not sure what inbox.py does but I presume it is some sort of web form to e-mail script. If this is the case then the above steps are still true and it may be that inbox.py needs to be configured to forward e-mail to a mail server that is configured to process messages for mysite.org domain.