# Generating user email accounts **URL:** \ **Category:** Rails\ **Created:** [February 10, 2007, 4:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/generating-user-email-accounts/85119 "2007-02-10T04:09:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 7\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![PeteSalty](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/bc79bd/32.png) [@PeteSalty](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/PeteSalty)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2007, 4:09am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/generating-user-email-accounts/85119/1 "2007-02-10T04:09:31Z")
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 ---
**Author:** ![PeteSalty](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/bc79bd/32.png) [@PeteSalty](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/PeteSalty)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2007, 5:29am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/generating-user-email-accounts/85119/2 "2007-02-10T05:29:37Z")
Hi Dale, will these e-mail accounts be used on the site only? -Conrad ---
**Author:** ![PeteSalty](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/bc79bd/32.png) [@PeteSalty](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/PeteSalty)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2007, 6:00am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/generating-user-email-accounts/85119/3 "2007-02-10T06:00:39Z")
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 removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid and removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid get processed and assigned to their perspective account (bob and steve669) but removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid 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 ---
**Author:** ![PeteSalty](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/bc79bd/32.png) [@PeteSalty](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/PeteSalty)\ **Post date:** [February 10, 2007, 3:51pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/generating-user-email-accounts/85119/4 "2007-02-10T15:51:43Z")
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/](http://www.greatcircle.com/majordomo/) $/usr/bin/mv /usr/bin/mv -rb. ---
**Author:** ![PeteSalty](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/bc79bd/32.png) [@PeteSalty](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/PeteSalty)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2007, 12:44am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/generating-user-email-accounts/85119/5 "2007-02-11T00:44:11Z")
> 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://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/HowToReceiveEmailsWithActionMailer) [http://api.rubyonrails.com/files/vendor/rails/actionmailer/README.html](http://api.rubyonrails.com/files/vendor/rails/actionmailer/README.html) -Kyle ---
**Author:** ![PeteSalty](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/bc79bd/32.png) [@PeteSalty](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/PeteSalty)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2007, 1:26am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/generating-user-email-accounts/85119/6 "2007-02-11T01:26:13Z")
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. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) ---
**Author:** ![PeteSalty](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/p/bc79bd/32.png) [@PeteSalty](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/PeteSalty)\ **Post date:** [February 11, 2007, 1:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/generating-user-email-accounts/85119/7 "2007-02-11T01:28:14Z")
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