"Because it's up-side down. Why is that? It makes replies harder to read. Why not? Please don't top-post." - Sherm Pendley, Mac OS X list
Moon, John wrote:
Chris,
Thank you for the suggestion but when I say "process" I mean that I need to read the "reply", grep for user id and a confirmation number, update my database to say that the email I send was "replied to" as requested, and that the email address I was given was correct... I am registering users for access to web ap. and need(require) a good email address (initially!).
Plus I am not an admin but a developer and "procmail" is not a product I believe I can use... (at least I can't find it on this UNIX box)
Anyone else?
jwm
Chris' point was that you can intercept the message as it is delivered and process it in "real time" as opposed to having it sit in a queue (read mailbox). So rather than checking periodically (via cron) that a message has arrived, your process is kicked off when the message arrives and gets fed its contents on STDIN. A very good way to handle incoming mail. procmail and sendmail both handle this type of process, so if procmail isn't available and sendmail is it will still work. The only setup requirement is that you can point an address at a "pipe" but regardless the address setup is virtually the same, and you will have to have an address.... unless....
If you really just want to verify that the user can receive mail, then rather than have them reply, why not just provide a link that they can click on that will go to a specific URL with the confirmation information in it. This tends to be easier than dealing with incoming mail, as you will have to parse the message, etc. And you are really testing their ability to receive e-mail and use your web site, rather than their ability to send messages to your mailing lists, etc. (unless that *is* what you are doing).
I have used the latter on several sites and other than the occasional user who absolutely refuses to actually read the mail they get (in which cases replying ain't going to help) it works very well.
http://danconia.org
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