Simple email processor

This repo contains a set of SMTP servers that do various things with the incoming emails.

Installation

pip install git+https://github.com/InnovativeTravel/email-processor

Usage

To get usage instructions run in a terminal:

emailprocessor --help

The basic usage is as follows:

emailprocessor -a $ADDRESS -p $PORT -

Examples

Print email summary

Start a SMTP server on port 1025 of your local host that prints a summary of every incoming email:

emailprocessor --address 127.0.0.1 --port 1025 print_summary

Since you didn't specify a username during invocation, a random UUID will be used as the receiving username.

Move Bing Ads reports to S3

See this blog entry for more information. To start a server that does exactly what is described in our blog you just need to run:

emailprocessor \
    -a $ADDRESS \
    -p 25 \
    --username $USERNAME \
    bing_to_s3 \
    --bucket $S3_BUCKET
    --prefix $S3_PREFIX

where:

• $ADDRESS is the public IP or DNS name of your server
• $USERNAME is the email recipient that will be associated with the processing of incoming Bing Ads emails. If not provided, a random UUID will be used.
• $S3_BUCKET is the name of the target S3 bucket
• $S3_PREFIX is the target S3 prefix (the destination path in S3)

Once the SMTP server is running you should direct your Bing reports to $USERNAME@$ADDRESS.

Security considerations

This email processor is just a proof-of-concept so security considerations were not a concern for us. There are some things you can and should do to make your email processor safer:

• Use an SSL-enabled SMTP server. This is something we plan to do in the near future.
• Use a whitelist for the sender's IP address. For instance, if you deploy the Bing Ads report processor in AWS-EC2 you should associate your EC2 instance to a security group that allows incoming emails only from Bing Ads' email servers. Alternatively, you could use network ACLs to achieve the same result.
• Use a difficult to guess username as the recipient of the emails. If you don't provide a username during invokation, the email processor will generate a random UUID as the recipient. Emails sent to any other recipient will be simply ignored.

Caveats

Apart from the security issues, a caveat is that a STMP server instance can be associated only to one email processor. This is actually a very easy fix that we will take care of very soon.

Development environment on AWS

You can easily set up a development environment in the AWS cloud with vagrant. Install vagrant and then install the required plug-ins:

vagrant plugin install vagrant-aws
vagrant plugin install inifile
vagrant plugin install yaml

Then install the dummy AWS box that you will find in the vagrant directory of this repo:

vagrant box add aws-dummy aws-dummy.box

Go to the vagrant directory and copy the vagrant config template:

cp config.yaml .config.yaml

Then edit the .config.yaml you just created so that it matches your AWS configuration. You should then be ready to fire up the AWS instance using:

vagrant up

You should also be able to SSH into the instance:

vagrant ssh

Don't forget to destroy the instance when you are done. Otherwise you will keep paying for it:

vagrant destroy

Deployment

To be done.

Who do I talk to?

German <german@innovativetravel.eu>