Question

I have users sending emails with some text I need to extract. Each user’s email is mapped to a single mailbox. I’m currently using a cron job that polls the mailbox (postfix) every 5 minutes, checks for new messages, and sends it to a queue where I have workers parse them. I have two main questions:

1. Is there a way I can parse the email as soon as it’s received instead of
   polling the server? Also, how could
   I implement this to be scalable? For
   example, if there are 50 incoming
   messages per second.
2. I’m programatically writing each user’s email address to point to mailbox in the postfix configuration file. Would it be better to create a catch all account, so I don’t have to write each email address? However, I know catch-all accounts are more susceptible to spam.

Answer 1

Use a pipe alias to catch the email, then use celery to dump it into a MQ for processing.