Mailing to MoinMoin

Introduction

I wanted to configure MoinMoin (version 1.9.2) on RileyLink to receive mail and to also modified the way it is processed.

Finding comprehensive details on setting up MoinMoin to receive mail was not easy, so I have detailed my experience here and in a page describing my modified mail handling - dropbox_mailimport.py.

Primarily, this is is for my own records, but it might also be useful to others wanting to do something similar.

Piping mail to MoinMoin

This is how it was done with mail forwarded to a DreamHost shell account (see http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Shell-linked_E-mail) by Panel → Mail → Message Filters via “Add a filter” → “Forward mail to a shell account”.

.forward.postfix (in $HOME)

   1 "| sh $HOME/mailpipe.sh"

mailpipe.sh (in $HOME or a location of choice specified in .forward.postfix)

   1  #!/bin/bash
   2  # just capture stdin so you know it got this far
   3  cat - > $HOME/lastmail
   4  # use paths as appropriate for your directory structure
   5  cat $HOME/lastmail | python $HOME/local/lib/python2.4/site-packages/MoinMoin/script/moin.py \
   6  --config-dir=$HOME/local/wiki/ \
   7  --wiki-url=http://sitename.net/ \
   8  xmlrpc mailimport

The piping of the forwarded mail direct to moin.py can be done as a single step in .forward.postfix, but with the shell script gives you scope to do more if you wish. Also, you could use MailDrop mail filtering (see http://wiki.dreamhost.com/Maildrop), if you wanted to direct only a subset of the incoming mail to moin.py.

Option --config-dir= must point to where mailimportconf.py is kept.

Option --wiki-url= seems redundant. The MoinMoin/script/xmlrpc/mailimport.py appears to get the url only from mailimportconf.py, but I am willing to be corrected on this point.

The actual processing of the piped mail is done by MoinMoin/mail/mailimport.py, so it could be replaced or extended to enhance the import of mail by MoinMoin, as there appears to be no direct provision for plugin mail handlers. Putting a modified ProcessMail.py in wiki/data/plugin/xmlrpc that imports the modified mailimport.py from a location under the wiki instance (rather than under .../site-packages/MoinMoin) could be a more robust strategy.

To get mail import working the other necessary settings are:

wikiconfig.py

   1 #permit xmlrpc, excluded by default in multiconfig.py
   2 actions_excluded = multiconfig.DefaultConfig.actions_excluded + []
   3 actions_excluded.remove('xmlrpc')
   4 #ProcessMail needs a secret in mailimportconf.py, so do them all
   5 secrets = {'action/cache':'some random string 1',
   6            'wikiutil/tickets': 'some random string 2',
   7            'jabberbot': 'some random string 3',
   8            'xmlrpc/ProcessMail': 'some random string 4',
   9            'xmlrpc/RemoteScript': 'some random string 5',
  10            }

mailimportconf.py

   1 mail_import_secret = "some random string 4" #as secrets for xmlrpc/ProcessMail
   2 mail_import_url = u"http://your_moinmoin_domain/?action=xmlrpc2"

Modified mail processing

The above should get you mail into MoinMoin and processed by MoinMoin/mail/mailimport.py.

If you wish to do it your way, this can be achieved as follows.

ProcessMail.py

Modified to point to a replacement for MoinMoin/mail/mailimport.py.

   1 # from MoinMoin.mail import mailimport
   2 import modified_mailimport as mailimport # a modified mailimport

The modified copy of ProcessMail.py is placed in wiki/data/plugin/xmlrpc.

modified_mailimport.py

Your replacement for MoinMoin/mail/mailimport.py to provide for a different processing of imported mail.

It can be placed in wiki/data/plugin/xmlrpc (or other suitable location, with import in ProcessMail.py modified accordingly).

If the modifications are only partial the original content of mailimport.py can be reused as follows:

   1 from MoinMoin.mail.mailimport import *

My modified mailimport does this (see dropbox_mailimport.py). I needed to rework the main mail processing function, import_mail_from_message, to either have the mail processed (1) as the inbuilt module, or (2) according to my modifications, based on a task word in the mail's subject line.

Hits

472