On Oct 17, 2012, at 12:15 PM, Cary Gordon wrote:
> The "securely" part is a gotcha. I would venture a guess that whatever
> the gadget does to produce emails doesn't include encryption or key
> verification.
What do you qualify as 'securely'?
You scan the message & attachment to make sure it's valid, process it, and then either put it in place (if local) or scp over to the server that's doing the hosting.
If you're concerned about the e-mail itself being unsecure, then you have to look into what protocols the appliance supports. If it does ASMTP (Authenticated SMTP) over TLS, then you're fine:
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2554.txt
If it doesn't, well, then you set up a local mail relay that's firewalled off so that only the appliance can talk to it, and have that one do the processing / transfer.
...
We used to use these sorts of things at the university where I used to work.
One would process the class schedules (generated as a nightly report from the registration system), and make a series of pages for gopher (later modified to generate HTML). Another was used so that authorized users could modify the 'university status' message (eg, closed due to snow) years before there were protocols such as webdav.
It's also quite useful for generating status pages based on cronjob messages.
-Joe
> On Wed, Oct 17, 2012 at 9:05 AM, Joe Hourcle
> <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>> On Oct 17, 2012, at 11:46 AM, Nate Hill wrote:
>>
>>> Maybe someone can offer me a suggestion here...
>>> I bought a nifty new gadget that records data and spits out csv files as
>>> email attachments.
>>> I want to go from csv > MySQL and build a web application to do cool stuff
>>> with the data.
>>> The thing is, the device can only email the files as attachments, it
>>> doesn't give me the ability to upload them to a server.
>>> Can anyone suggest how I can securely email a file directly to a folder on
>>> a server?
>>>
>>> The scenario is nearly identical to what is described here:
>>> http://www.quora.com/How-can-I-upload-to-an-FTP-site-via-email
>>
>>
>> It depends if you're hosting the mail server or not. If you are,
>> and it's a unix box, you change your .forward file to pipe into
>> a program to do the processing, eg:
>>
>> |/path/to/program
>>
>>
>> If you're already using procmail for local mail delivery, you
>> can do more complex things with a .procmailrc file. (eg, only
>> pass along to the processing program messages that match
>> certain characteristics):
>>
>> http://www.procmail.org/
>>
>>
>> If you're not hosting your own mail server, you might be able
>> to cobble something together with fetchmail, which retrieves
>> mail from IMAP or *POP* services and then processes it for
>> local delivery:
>>
>> http://www.fetchmail.info/
>>
>> -Joe
>>
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Cary Gordon
> The Cherry Hill Company
> http://chillco.com
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