[Dovecot] Delivery notifications

[mouss]

Brandon Keepers wrote:
> I'm working on an application that is backed by Postfix 2.3.8 and 
> Dovecot 1.0.13, configured with virtual domains, for handling messaging.
> 
> I need to be able to send the notification (such as "You've received a 
> new message on SomeAwesomeService. Click here to check it out", It's 
> evil, I know) to a different email address, such as a mobile device. 
> Eventually, we want to do other things like clear web page caches when a 
> message is received, or sending IM notifications, but that's for another 
> day.

as you say, it's evil... you can try to reduce the "evilness" by not 
doing the notification in real time. I mean take few minutes so that you 
send one notification if you get multiple messages during a short period 
of time.

> 
> So basically, we want to notify our application whenever a new mail is 
> received, and it can do all the magical things that it needs to do.
> 
> I was hoping to get some feedback on the different approaches I'm 
> looking at. From what I can tell, there's not a way to deliver to 
> multiple virtual transports in postfix, so here's the options I see:

you can use virtual_alias_maps or one of the bcc options to deliver a 
copy of the message to a mailbox that does what you want.


> 
> * Content filter
> I could set up a "content filter" that just delivers the mail to the 
> application, and then re-injects it back into postfix. This seems like 
> more work than the other options just because I have to worry about 
> re-injecting the message
> 
> * Intercept delivery
> Replace the dovecot deliver command with a custom one that calls the 
> dovecot deliver and then passes the message on to the application.  I've 
> written a little proof of concept for this and it seems to work, but 
> just seem shady.

This is better. just make sure to pass arguments "securely". once you do 
your notification, simply run dovecot with the same command line args as 
you would use in master.cf.

> 
> * Sieve
> Dovecot supports Sieve, so I could just have a global sieve script that 
> sends the notifications.  This is definitely the solution I'm leaning 
> towards.


I don't know if you can exec from dovecot-sieve.

> 
> Are there any better options?  Do you think this will have a significant
> impact on performance?   Am I crazy?

depends on how much they pay :)