Question

I have a postfix server listening and receiving all emails received at mywebsite.com Now I want to show these postfix emails in a customized interface and that too for each user

To be clear, all the users of mywebsite.com will be given mail addresses like [e-mail] who receives email on my production machine but he sees them in his own console built into his dashboard at mywebsite.com.

So to make the user see the mail he received, I need to create an email replica of the postfix mail so that mywebsite(which runs on django-python) will be reflecting them readily. How do I achieve this. To be precise this is my question, how do I convert a postfix mail to a python mail object(so that my system/website)understands it?

Just to be clear I have written psuedo code to achieve what I want:

email_as_python_object = postfix_email_convertor(postfix_email) attachments_list = email_as_python_object.attachments body = email_as_python_object.body # be it html or whatever 

And by the way I have tried default email module which comes with python but thats not handy for all the cases. And even I need to deal with mail attachments manually(which I hate). I just need a simple way to deal with cases like these(I was wondering how postfix understands a email received. ie.. how it automatically figures out different headers,attachments etc..). Please help me.

Answer 1

First of all, Postfix mail routing rules can be very complex and your presumably preferred solution involves a lot of trickery in the wrong places. You do not want to accidentally show some user anothers mails, do you? Second, although Postfix can do almost anything, it shouldn’t as it only is a MDA (mail delivery agent).

Your solution is best solved by using a POP3 or IMAP server (Cyrus IMAPd, Courier, etc). IMAP servers can have ‘superuser accounts’ who can read mails of all users. Your web application can then connect to the users mailbox and retreive the headers and bodys.

If you only want to show the subject-line you can fetch those with a special IMAP command and very low overhead. The Python IMAP library has not the easiest to understand API though. I’ll give it a shot (not checked!) with an example taken from the standard library:

import imaplib  sess = imaplib.IMAP4() sess.login('superuser', 'password') # Honor the mailbox syntax of your server! sess.select('INBOX/Luke') # Or something similar.  typ, data = sess.search(None, 'ALL') # All Messages.  subjectlines = [] for num in data[0].split():     typ, msgdata = sess.fetch(num, '(RFC822.SIZE BODY[HEADER.FIELDS (SUBJECT)])')     subject = msgdata[0][1].lstrip('Subject: ').strip()     subjectlines.append(subject) 

This logs into the IMAP server, selects the users mailbox, fetches all the message-ids then fetches (hopefully) only the subjectlines and appends the resulting data onto the subjectlines list.

To fetch other parts of the mail vary the line with sess.fetch. For the specific syntax of fetch have a look at RFC 2060 (Section 6.4.5).

Good luck!