Mail Monitoring

Rattail has a basic “Mail Monitoring” (mailmon) service which can watch an IMAP folder, and perform actions on any messages which appear.

Note that one of those actions, presumably the last, should be to move the message into a different IMAP folder, or perhaps delete it outright. This is to avoid re-processing the same message over and over. The IMAP folder being watched is essentially treated as a “queue” and everything in it will be processed.

Example config for this looks something like (in mailmon.conf):

[rattail.mailmon]
monitor = myfolder

myfolder.imap.server = mail.example.com
myfolder.imap.username = myuser
myfolder.imap.password = mypass
myfolder.imap.folder = INBOX.Incoming-Messages
myfolder.actions = download, move
myfolder.action.download.func = rattail.mailmon.actions:download_message
myfolder.action.download.args = /srv/envs/poser/app/work/mailmon/myfolder
myfolder.action.download.kwarg.locking = true
myfolder.action.move.func = rattail.mailmon.actions:move_message
myfolder.action.move.args = INBOX.Processed-Messages

In the above example we are watching the “Incoming-Messages” folder, which is a subfolder of the INBOX itself. Any messages which appear there will be downloaded to local file system, and then moved to the “Processed-Messages” IMAP folder on the server.

Running the command is usually done via supervisor (so as to make it behave as a proper service), but the command line itself looks like:

cd /srv/envs/poser
sudo -u rattail bin/rattail -c app/mailmon.conf mailmon start