Is there a way to bcc an email into a database somewhere?

February 20, 2007 6:13 AM

Is there a way to bcc an email into a database somewhere?

I'm using Gallery2, and really like the emails it sends the customer and me. I don't want to rewrite that form.

I'd just like to be able to copy a database in on it, so it saves them all somewhere. Any ideas?

posted by andrewzipp to computers & internet (3 answers total)

Do you have control over the MTA (sendmail, postfix, exim, etc) that gallery2 pipes it's mail to? IF you do, then keeping a blind cc of anything passing through will be trivial. If not, then rewriting the form may be your best option (which itself shouldn't be too hard but will mean a hint of extra maintenance every time you upgrade the code).
posted by devbrain at 6:32 AM on February 20, 2007

OK, you've got your email in a database, then what? Are you going to write SQL every time you want to look something up?

In a nutshell, what are you really trying to accomplish? If you just want to maintain an archive for these emails, create a dedicated email address that you bcc: this stuff to. If you can handle Google owning all that content, GMail is a damn fine email database. Most modern desktop clients, though, offer search that is probably good enough for what you want. If you need to export out lists or archives, there are tons of shareware tools that will do this for you- there are a bunch that archive to FileMaker, and I assume the same for Access.
posted by mkultra at 7:03 AM on February 20, 2007

I'm using Gallery2, and really like the emails it sends the customer and me.

The emails are already going to you? If you're receiving them on a machine where procmail is running, you could just make a recipe that sends a copy of them to whatever script you want...

:0 c
* ^From:.*gallery@whatever
| insert_email_in_db.sh

Then it's just a Small Matter Of Programming to write the script you need to do the insert...
posted by aneel at 9:03 AM on February 20, 2007