ivixlog

chompmail!

I suppose I’d better mention Chompmail, the cute little app I made at the Super Happy Dev Club (SHDC) (Cambridge)  #10, which was a lot of fun.

Chompmail is a email to web forwarding service, powered by a hippo named Hugo.

The basic use case goes something like this: You have an email in your inbox, perhaps with attachments.

You want to share it with someone but don’t want to email it to them for whatever reason. Normally you’d have to download the mail, save it, and find somewhere to upload it. With chompmail, you can just forward it to hugo@chompmail.co.uk. Hugo will reply with a url, and you can share that. Also, there’s a cute hippo!

Implementation details:

The mailserver for chompmail.co.uk is Postfix. In /etc/aliases you have an entry like this:   

hugo: |/var/www/chompmail.co.uk/chompmail/mailchomper.py      

That mailchomper script uses the python email and mimetypes libraries to parse the email passed in via stdin. It writes the email and its attachments to a tmpdir, and then sends a reply back to the user telling them of the URL. On the web-side it is a very simple django installation, with a single app with a view for the index, and another to show an email.  No security or models needed.

If anyone expresses any interest, i’d be happy to share the source.