Question

The Django site I’m working on at the moment sends out emails when content is updated.

A feature I would like to add is where users can reply to these mails, ie comment on a topic. This reply then appears updated on the page.

What would be a good approach to tackle this? Are there any modules out there that can be dropped in?

Answer 1

First things first, you’ll need to be able to receive mail and call a python function upon doing so. There are a number of ways to do this:

• using Python’s built-in poplib to check your mailbox at regular intervals
• some webhosts, Webfaction in particular, allow you to call python scripts automatically when you receive mail, through something they call mail2script
• other hosts recommend using third-party services like Mailgun or Postmark. It depends on your needs, really.

Once you’re receiving mail and able to call a python script in this event, it could be simple as adding the comment to the correct thread in your Django models.

You should, however, when considering building this feature, also consider ways to make it more secure (emails are notoriously easy to forge) – you don’t want random people to be able to post comments as others. This isn’t all that easy to do, but unique email reply-to IDs is one reasonably straight-forward way (but in no way guaranteed secure).