通过电子邮件创建Web条目

Question

Many web applications (asana, basecamp, highrisehq, etc) have this feature. For example: If any user create a task for other user then The task notified to related user.

If task owner reply this email. Replay adress similar to the following:

[e-mail]

this is a virtual email address. When Web application (basecamp) receive this email. Task owner's email will comment for task.

My question is: How to, The web application create a virtual email address and read this mailbox?

How to, I will create a similar feature on my symfony2 based web application?

Answer 1

The regular way is to forward inbound email to a program that parses the email and updates your database appropriately. You symfony2-based web application sees the new state when it's accessed.

Most MTAs can support that, typically by enabling subaddresses and adding an account. For example, if you use Postfix you could create an account called todo set recipient_delimiter to - as in this recipe and write |/home/todo/bin/add-todo-from-email in /home/todo/.forward. Once that is done, sending mail to [e-mail] or just [e-mail] makes /home/todo/bin/add-todo-from-email be executed.

Programs such as formail/procmail and mailman are examples of open source programs that act on email. If you google for formail you'll find a few examples.

Parsing email is fun, though...