I set up a printing queue in 1991 using a shell script that polled a directory for a file. You could set up email users for each command and have the script poll the mail queues. It would execute a given command for each user. There is always another way to do it in Linux.
Ken On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 7:35 PM Ben Koenig <techkoe...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On 1/21/21 12:05 PM, Ali Corbin wrote: > > On Thu, Jan 21, 2021 at 8:11 AM Michael Barnes <barnmich...@gmail.com> > > wrote: > > > >> Is there a way to execute a script via email? I have a machine that does > >> several monitoring tasks of equipment. When certain conditions are > detected > >> and at scheduled times, the machine sends status emails to me. I would > like > >> to send an email back to execute a script to perform tasks. > >> > >> Is there an easy way to do this? > >> > > I suspect that it's not easy, but I'm sure it's possible, because you > can > > set up blogger.com to create a post from an email sent to > som...@blogger.com > > . Unfortunately, the mechanism that actually does it will be on their > > servers in a place that's not visible. Perhaps a google search might > > explain how they do this. > > > There are actually a few more steps in that process. Most web interfaces > for blogs or support ticket databases are actually scanning a configured > email inbox on a routine basis. Sometimes this is a cron job or other > process running as a daemon on the web server. Every time this process > scans the inbox, any new emails are parsed and operated on according to > various filters. > > > I set one of these up back in 2019. We configured osTicket to scan our > support@ inbox every 60 seconds. Any emails it found would be ingested > as tickets in the SQL database and then moved to a "read" box for > archival purposes if osTicket went down. Pretty sure that was all just > PHP code in osTicket...all I did was click buttons. > > > Blogs and other web frameworks do all kinds of things in respond to > email. Once an email client opens a message it can basically do whatever > it wants. By default Thunderbird does every time an email is received. > Those notifications you receive in the corner of your screen are > typically part of an external program, not your email client. > > > If your email client can execute 'notify-send "$EMAIL_SUBJECT" > "$EMAIL_BODY" ' in response to an email, it can execute any program > accessible to the user it runs as. Trying to do this as part of the > email server process seems like an excessive amount of work if you ask me. > > > Sounds like all we need is an email client that supports running > arbitrary commands when filtering emails.. > > -Ben > > _______________________________________________ > PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org > PLUG mailing list > PLUG@pdxlinux.org > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG: https://pdxlinux.org PLUG mailing list PLUG@pdxlinux.org http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
