Laziness-proof eMail backend script

By Pranav Sharma On April 22, 2006 · 1 Comment

This started yesterday at work and was finished this morning after I passed out dead-tired last night.

I wrote a backend script for handling the emails that come to “all AT pranav NOSPACE sharma DOT com”

Now why did I do this?

Many emails were going around to that address and since some people simply hit “Reply All”, the authors of previous emails got the reply twice. This was annoying!!!

So, without going into much detail, I redesigned the whole process of how these emails got relayed to each person. Now you can click either “Reply” or “Reply All”, it won’t matter. This thing is laziness-proof (although I want to say idiot-proof).

So without further delay, here is my script which was shamelessly inspired from MEOW (ebackend.com). If you want to use this, please remove the ‘\’ before each ‘<' and '>‘. Also, notice the email addresses have been written so that robots cannot read it on this post. For the actual script, you must use actual email addresses with the ‘@’ preceeded by a ‘\’ like this: ‘\@’

#!/usr/bin/perl -w

######################################################################
## The following code has been adapted from MEOW (www.ebackend.com) ##
######################################################################

BEGIN {

$::INC[@::INC] = “/home/pranavs/public_html/all AT pranav NOSPACE sharma DOT com/Lib”;

require Mail::POP3Client;
require XML::Simple;
}

print “Content-type: text/html\n\n”;

# Read login information

my $xml_config = ‘/home/pranavs/public_html/all AT pranav NOSPACE sharma DOT com/config.xml’; # XML Configuration

my $config = &ReadConfig($xml_config);
if ( !$config ) {
print “\nConfiguration file Invalid / Not Present\n “;
exit;
}

# Get mails from the mailbox into %NewItems
# $new_items stores count
my $new_items = &ReadMailBox($config, \%NewItems);

if ( !$new_items) {
print “\nNo new messages for all AT pranav NOSPACE sharma DOT com”;
exit;
} else {
&SendMail(\%NewItems);
}

######################################################################
####################### Helper Functions #############################
######################################################################

sub ReadConfig {

my ($config) = @_;

$config = XML::Simple::XMLin(“$config”) ;

return $config;
}

sub ReadMailBox {

my ($config_hash, $new_item_hash) = @_;
my $msg_count;

# Connect to a POP Mailbox using POP3Client library
$Mail = new Mail::POP3Client( USER =\> “$$config_hash{‘mail’}{‘user’}”,
PASSWORD =\> “$$config_hash{‘mail’}{‘pass’}”,
HOST =\> “$$config_hash{‘mail’}{‘host’}”,
);

$$config_hash{‘mail’}{‘newitems’} = $Mail-\>Count();

if ( $$config_hash{‘mail’}{‘newitems’} \< 1 ) {
return 0;
}

for( $msg_count = 1; $msg_count \<= $$config_hash{'mail'}{'newitems'}; $msg_count++ ) {

foreach( $Mail-\>Head( $msg_count ) ) {

if ( $_ =~ m/^((From|Subject)):(.*?)$/i ) {
$header = lc($1);
$$new_item_hash{$msg_count}{$header} = $3;
}
}

$$new_item_hash{$msg_count}{‘body’} = $Mail-\>Body( $msg_count );

#Adding a footer to each email with unsibscribe instructions
if ($$new_item_hash{$msg_count}{‘body’} =~ m/\<\/body\>\s*\<\/html\>/i) {
$$new_item_hash{$msg_count}{‘body’} =~ s/\<\/body\>\s*\<\/html\>/\\\
To stop receiving these emails, send an email to unsubscribe AT pranav NOSPACE sharma DOT com.\To see a list of subscribed members, send an email to whois AT pranav NOSPACE sharma DOT com.\<\/body\>\<\/html\>/i ;
} else {
$$new_item_hash{$msg_count}{‘body’} .=”\n\n——————————————————-\nTo stop receiving these emails, send an email to unsubscribe AT pranav NOSPACE sharma DOT com.\nTo see a list of subscribed members, send an email to whois AT pranav NOSPACE sharma DOT com”;
}

if( $$new_item_hash{$msg_count}{‘from’} =~ m/(.+)\s*\<([\+\w\.\-]+\@[\w\.\-]+\.[a-z][a-z]+)\>/i ) {
$$new_item_hash{$msg_count}{‘from’} = $1;
}

$$new_item_hash{$msg_count}{‘valid’} = 0;
$Mail-\>Delete( $msg_count);
}

$Mail-\>Close();

return $$config_hash{‘mail’}{‘newitems’};
}

sub SendMail {

my ($newItems_List ) = @_;

foreach $msg_count ( keys %$newItems_List ) {

unless(open (MAIL, “|/usr/sbin/sendmail -t”)) {
print “error.\n”;
warn “Error starting sendmail: $!”;
}
else{
if($$newItems_List{$msg_count}{‘body’} =~ m/\s+–(.*[=_\.0-9a-z]+)–/i ) {
my $boundary = $1;
print MAIL “Content-Type: multipart/alternative;\n”;
print MAIL ” boundary=\”$1\”\n”;
print MAIL “MIME-Version: 1.0\n”;
}
print MAIL “From: $$newItems_List{$msg_count}{‘from’}\\n”;
print MAIL “BCC: all DO NOT REPLY to this address AT pranav NOSPACE sharma DOT com\n”;
print MAIL “Subject: $$newItems_List{$msg_count}{‘subject’}\n”;
print MAIL “\n$$newItems_List{$msg_count}{‘body’}”;
close(MAIL) || warn “Error closing mail: $!”;
print “Mail sent.\n”;
}