Just to expand a little on neilwatson's answer, Anonymonk,
you've got the problem backwards. More likely than not, you
don't want to write a perl program to poll a mailbox for new
messages. You'd be much better off hooking something into
your mail delivery process (procmail is the most common way
to do this under *nix) which can detect relevant messages
and call your perl as needed.
One other thing: I started setting up something like what
you describe once, a few years back. I quit just as it was
getting to the point of usability because I realized that,
with the ease of intercepting and forging email, it would be
a major security risk. Consider whether your goal can be
achieved without emailing commands around and, if not, be
extremely cautious in your perl code. Use taint.
Read all the standard precautions for securing CGI code and
use them. Make sure you're using taint properly. Then go
back over it and make sure you haven't missed anything. | [reply] |
You could also use /etc/mail/aliases directly, similar to the way many mailing list applications do, such as Mailman, majordomo and the like. The syntax is easy:
user@domain.com: "|/path/to/perl/script.pl"
# Make sure to run 'newaliases' to regenerate
There's also Chip Salzenberg's deliver program documented here. There are many native ways which don't rely on necessarily installing core perl modules such as Mail::Audit (tutorial here) and friends. When working on boxes where installing externally available perl modules is not an option (i.e. for paranoid sysadmins), this may be a better alternative (TMTOWTDI). | [reply]
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