Generating user email accounts

Rails
1

OK, so we’re getting really close to lauch and someone insists on
adding a new feature, great, not a problem, but I’ve never done this
before, hopefully someone here can at least point me in the right
direction.

We now need to automatically create an email account for each user
that signs up. This email will be used to take incoming messages,
parse them and then present the data to the user. Users will not be
able to access them as pop accounts.

This is all well and good but I have no idea how to do this, what to
use for the email server (we’re Linux so I think Postfix might be
best, but maybe not), or how to hook the account creation into Rails.
Any help here would be greatly appreciated, even just a pointer to
some other article that may even just touch on this.

Thanks in advance
Dale

2

Hi Dale, will these e-mail accounts be used on the site only?

-Conrad

3

Yes, they are essentially there so that users can send an email with a
subject like ‘Dons Party 3/17/07’ to their site account and we create
a celendar entry for them on the 17th of March 2007 with the title
Dons Party (to be honest I’m not sure this is such a good idea but
what do I know). There is no outbound mail and they can’t use a POP
client (say Outlook) to pick up their mail. Once the mail is recieved
and processed it gets deleted.

Rather than creating a seperate email account for each user we could
just have a catch all account that gets all email, and then we just
pick up and process the ones that have matching users, say
[email protected] and [email protected] get processed and
assigned to their perspective account (bob and steve669) but
[email protected] gets deleted because there is no account with
username davesmith. Once again, I don’t know if this is a good idea or
not.

Dale

4

Take a Look at majordome, it has some of the features your are looking.

In my opinion would be better to have just one email account receiving
emails
in a given format so that you can parse them easly

http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/

$/usr/bin/mv /usr/bin/mv

-rb.

5

This is all well and good but I have no idea how to do this, what to
use for the email server (we’re Linux so I think Postfix might be
best, but maybe not), or how to hook the account creation into Rails.
Any help here would be greatly appreciated, even just a pointer to
some other article that may even just touch on this.

http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToReceiveEmailsWithActionMailer
http://api.rubyonrails.com/files/vendor/rails/actionmailer/README.html

-Kyle

6

Thanks rb, but majordomo is really a list server, which is not what
I’m looking for.

On Feb 10, 6:51 am, Rodrigo B. [email protected]

7

Kyle,

Thanks so much for pointing this out, I knew there’d be a Rails way of
doing it I just didn’t believe, or at least, couldn’t concieve that it
would already come with the system. This is what happens when you come
from a .NET environment into Rails, you’re constantly astounded by
what is already done for you.

Dale