I recently made a website for a local church. They wanted to be able to post new "blessings" to their web page, but didn't want to have to edit the web site or know any HTML. I asked if they knew how to send an email, and they said that this was a do able task.

Using a mail box on their server and a cron job I put in this script which gathers the "blessing" from the email box, and shooves it into a data base. From there the web page gets the informatin from the database (mysql in this case with a PHP page).

I' sure most of you do this type of thing all the time, but I thought it was such a cool little service to offer those who can't do more than send an email, a method of getting more out of their website and having a bit a fun at the same time.

Here's the script I used for the mail box. Any commet, as always, is welcome. 
#! /usr/bin/perl -w

use strict;

use File::Spec;
use Mail::MboxParser;
use DBI;

my $dbh = DBI->connect('DBI:mysql:blessing:webadept.net',
                       'yourusername',
               'yourpassword',
                undef);

chdir("/var/spool/mail");

my $mail = File::Spec->catfile('blessing');
my $mb  = Mail::MboxParser->new($mail);

my @a   = $mb->get_messages;

my $mailbox = 'blessing';

open(IN,">$mailbox");
close(IN);

foreach my $msg(@a)
{<

 my $subject = $msg->header->{subject};
 my $from = $msg->header->{from};
 my $body = $msg->body->as_string;

 $body=$dbh->quote($body);
 $from=$dbh->quote($from);
 $subject = $dbh->quote($subject);

 my $q = qq`insert into blessings values(
                 '',
                $subject,
                $body,
                current_date,
                $from,
                1,
                '')
         `;
                      
   my $sth2 = $dbh->prepare($q);
   $sth2->execute() || die "Failed on update : \n$q\n\n";
       

 
} #foreach message loop ends


$dbh->disconnect;

[download]
webadept

--if its not fun, its not worth it --

Edit kudra, 2002-02-26 Replaced BR with CODE

In reply to Mail Poster For website pages by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.