A simple SMTP server to receive emails and queue them for later processing.
If you want to receive emails that should be automatically processed there are two options:
- Setup an actual email account and poll it over POP3/IMAP to get new emails
- Use a third party service for inbound email, like Mailgun
Option 1 doesn't work very well for distributed processing of incoming emails. It also involves polling and POP3, both horrible things.
Option 2 is probably the best in most cases, but sometimes you can't delegate your MX to such services or just need something simpler to setup.
This packages is a simple solution to roll your own receiver.
The main purpose of this project was to learn javascript and Node in a real application that solved an actual problem I had.
The simplest way is to use the docker image:
docker run -d \
--name popkiller \
-e BROKER_URL=amqp://rabbitmq \
-e POPKILLER_ROUTES='{"example.org": "defaultqueue"}' \
-p 2525:2525 \
gnpar/popkiller
Once started, connect with an SMTP client to port 2525 and send an email:
# sudo apt-get install sendemail
sendEmail -s localhost:2525 \
-f [email protected] \
-t [email protected] \
-u "Hello world!" \
-m "Test message"
The messages should be added to the queue defined in the routes, which can be inspected with the provided queue watch script:
docker exec -it popkiller node scripts/watch_queue.js defaultqueue
BROKER_URL
: RabbitMQ broker URL. The full format isamqp://<user>:<password>@<host>:<port>/<vhost>
but any element can be ommited.POPKILLER_HOST
: Address to listen on. Defaults to127.0.0.1
.POPKILLER_PORT
: Port to listen on. Defaults to 2525.POPKILLER_ROUTES
: Mapping of domains/addresses to queues. Must be valid JSON.
The received emails are parsed using Nodemailer's mailparser and serialized with JSON.
To deserialize attachments you will need to use buffer-json in your consumer. Checkout the queue watch script for an example.
Consumers written in other languages will have to implement the logic to deserialize buffers.
TODO: Add Python example
Anything after a +
sign in the destination address is considered a tag and multiple tags can be set.
For example, an email addressed to [email protected]
will have tags tag1
and tag2
.
The tags will be available in the tags
property of the queued object.