New service: Allow App Engine apps to receive email!

[Nick Johnson]

One shortcoming of purely HTTP-based webapps such as App Engine is
that they can't receive email. I know that some people are wanting to
create App Engine apps that do this, so I put together a service to
facilitate this. It runs as a standard SMTP server, and sends all the
email it receives via HTTP POST to a user-designated URL. It's free to
use (but not to abuse - see the 'about' page): http://www.smtp2web.com/

I've also created a Google Code project for it, so people can host
their own instances if they want: http://code.google.com/p/smtp2web/

Feedback is, of course, appreciated. I'd love to hear what projects
people are using it for, too!

[wave connexion(BQ)]

can't open http://www.smtp2web.com/.

Why google does not provide this service?

--
BQ

[Nick Johnson]

On Jun 10, 12:13 pm, "wave connexion(BQ)" <waveconnex...@gmail.com>
wrote:
> can't openhttp://www.smtp2web.com/. <http://www.smtp2web.com/>

Really? It's hosted on App Engine, and it Works For Me.

[theillustratedlife]

Hosted on App Engine? Wouldn't that mean that you can receive emails
via App Engine?

[TheBoredCoder]

By looking at the code, it looks like he runs the web framework on
appengine, and run the twisted framework on another box?

> > Really? It's hosted on App Engine, and it Works For Me.- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -

[Daniel Remeseiro]

this feature request has no sense, if you want to receive emails sent
from your app, use a domain attached to your app engine using google
apps.

no code magic here, read more about domains, dns, mx

1. Sign in to the Google App Engine admin console.
2. Go to Administration > Versions
3. Click the 'Add Domain...' button under Domain Setup.
4. Enter your domain name in the 'Domain Name:' field
5. Click 'Add Domain'. You will be directed to the Google Apps
administrator console to complete the process.
6. Log in to the Google Apps control panel with your administrator
account.
7. Accept the terms and specify the access URL you'd like to
provide for your application.
8. Click 'Accept'.

[Barry Hunter]

No, this app is so that you (or someone else) can send emails TO your
app engine app.

(say you want to accept blog posts my email, this service will accept
the email and send it to your app in a standard web request - so it
can be processed as see fit... )

--
Barry

- www.nearby.org.uk - www.geograph.org.uk -

[peter leng]

I need both send and receive function outside of GEA.

Would it be possible to set up a http interface to let my GAE Apps
send out email with a from field myu...@mydomian.com? This will
overcome the limitation from GAE MAIL API in which the sender must be
a registered administrator.

thanks.

On Jun 9, 3:14 pm, Nick Johnson <arach...@notdot.net> wrote:
> One shortcoming of purely HTTP-based webapps such as App Engine is

> that they can't receiveemail. I know that some people are wanting to

> create App Engine apps that do this, so I put together a service to

> facilitate this. It runs as a standard SMTP server, and sends all theemailit receives via HTTP POST to a user-designated URL. It's free to

[boson]

Nick,

This looks great - just what I was looking for to fill this missing
feature hole in GAE.

One concern is with the longevity of your free service. Can you
provide any assurances that you'll be around for a while before we tie
our infrastructure to yours?

Thanks.

On Jun 9, 1:14 pm, Nick Johnson <arach...@notdot.net> wrote:
> One shortcoming of purely HTTP-based webapps such as App Engine is

> that they can'treceiveemail. I know that some people are wanting to

[Jorge Vargas]

nice idea. I'll keep it in mind.

[Bill]

This is a great idea, Nick, and a great example of Web Hooks
(http://webhooks.pbwiki.com/), which I've been hearing a lot about
recently.
As in here:
http://joshua.schachter.org/2008/07/beyond-rest.html

On Jun 9, 1:14 pm, Nick Johnson <arach...@notdot.net> wrote:

[Jean-Lou Dupont]

Another simple idea:
- register a GMAIL account
- use FeedBurner to aggregate content from the inbox (see
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13474)
- read the resulting RSS/ATOM feed.

[Bill]

Except your back to a polling model and if you're doing an AppEngine
app, it's
not nearly as nice as getting data pushed at you through a convenient
POST.
I think it would be great if Google services all had web hooks in
addition to
GData.

On Jul 30, 3:25 pm, Jean-Lou Dupont <JeanLou.Dup...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Another simple idea:
> - register a GMAIL account

> - use FeedBurner to aggregate content from the inbox (seehttp://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13474)

[Jean-Lou Dupont]

depending on your requirement related to latency-to-processing of the
message queue, you can configure a FeedBurner feed "F2" to point to
your AppEngine and thus trigger processing of the email feed when
FeedBurner polls "F2".

[Nick Johnson]

On Jul 3, 8:32 pm, pl2k <pxl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I need both send and receive function outside of GEA.
>
> Would it be possible to set up a http interface to let my GAE Apps
> send out email with a from field myu...@mydomian.com? This will
> overcome the limitation from GAE MAIL API in which the sender must be
> a registered administrator.

Sorry, I won't be providing an interface to send mail. I don't want
the nightmare of trying to stop abuse by spammers.

-Nick

[Nick Johnson]

On Jul 30, 9:51 pm, boson <dan.kam...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Nick,
>
> This looks great - just what I was looking for to fill this missing
> feature hole in GAE.
>
> One concern is with the longevity of your free service. Can you
> provide any assurances that you'll be around for a while before we tie
> our infrastructure to yours?

I intend to keep it running indefinitely; however I can't provide
ironclad guarantees, since this _is_ a free service.

However, the project is open-source (http://code.google.com/p/
smtp2web/), so should the service ever go offline, you or someone else
can set up an identical service and run it yourself.

Apologies for the delayed response.

-Nick

[Joshua Schachter]

Appengine is exactly the kind of thing that I was thinking about when
I wrote that...