CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hmmm, this could actually work. I’m not sure whether AMaViS or imap2soap can process their standard input instead of running in daemon/multi-email modes, but if not, hacking them (especially imap2soap, I think) shouldn’t be too complicated.

I don’t think this solution would scale, but maybe for smaller sites/mailings it could be both a viable and easy-to-setup solution.

Can this setting be applied to a catch-all address?

This all sounds very interesting and I would love to be able to do mailings directly from site. I'm running on cPanel 11 too but don't see the option. I'd like to get all excited and get my host to enable it, so am watching this post with much interest.

Meanwhile, on the host with the forwarder, is there a relatively simple test that I could do to test the capability.

The best way would be to contact the good folks behind imap2soap (e.g., through our civicrm-mail mailing list) and ask them how much work would it be for imap2soap to handle messages coming from its standard input. (I’m not a Perl coder, but I assume for a Perl coder it would be in the a-couple-of-hours-tops range.)

Note that your host would have to have all the Perl modules imap2soap uses installed; from a quick look at the source, that’d be SOAP::Lite, Mail::IMAPClient, Mail::Verp, HTTP::Cookies, MIME::Entity, Getopt::Std and Fcntl.

Another note: I’m not sure imap2soap handles resubscribes – which were added in CiviCRM 1.9 – so it might be a good idea to ask for that too; the relevant changes are not extensive.

We have fairly few bounces maybe 100 out of 2000 emails and will have much less if we clean them up by putting the emails on hold. It is feasible for us to handle bounces manually, working on that, but would be nice to have the automatic capability (I think).

Note: this approach would work only for bounces that come to the bounce…@… email address, not SMTP-level bounces. It still would be better, though.

I don't have any idea what a hashbang is or if this is a standard feature of Cpanel 11 or something special that the host has setup.

Wikipedia to the rescue. On Unices, if you make a text/script file executable, the system check the file’s first line to see what program should be executed to run it. It’s a standard approach; if you look into the imap2soap sources, the first line says, ‘run me with the Perl interpreter’: #!/usr/bin/perl -w

I'm also not sure why php can't read the email directly

Because nobody wrote a PHP-to-SOAP gateway for CiviCRM (nor any other PHP script that would register the incoming emails with CiviCRM/CiviMail); the Perl solution we use (AMaViS) is known to work and cope with large amounts of email traffic. Code contributions are more than welcome.