“We love your open source work, the code is excellent, but would you mind showing us a quick fibonacci sequence on the whiteboard?” ಠ_ಠ

<3

the cause

seems like most of the images that are used by vagrant use an oudated version of the Guest Additions (at 4.2) which do not work with 4.3

fixing up guest additions

we start by installing the guest additions plugin

vagrant plugin install vagrant-vbguest  

append xorg server to the bootstrap.sh (guest additions won't work without it)

  apt-get update
  apt-get upgrade --yes
  ...

  apt-get install xorg

  ...

  apt-get autoremove
  apt-get clean

finally, re-run the provisioning

vagrant up --provision  

I published my vagrant setup on https://github.com/MaxPresman/vagrant-config

Requirements

Python contains the mail handling functions in the standard library, as a result, we just need to install the DB abstraction and ORM

Flask        ## web framework  
MySQL-python ## connecting and storing emails  
sqlalchemy   ## used for ORM -- can replace   with django or peeweee  

Models

I present the models in SQLalchemy formet, but those can easily be translated to django or peewee

email_account = Table('email_account', metadata,  
    Column('id', Integer, primary_key=True),
    Column('inbox_name', String(60), nullable=False),   
    Column('access_key', String(60), nullable=False),   
    )

emails_recieved = Table('emails_recieved', metadata,  
  Column('id', Integer, primary_key=True),
  Column('owner_id', Integer,                         
      ForeignKey("email_account.user_id"), nullable=False),
  Column('email_desc_html', Text, nullable=False),
  Column('email_from',String(100),nullable=False),
  Column('email_desc_plain', Text,nullable=False),
  Column('email_title', String(500),nullable=False),
)

Mail server

Since this is a small test mail server, we can direct the MX records to the IP of the server. a Namecheap example will look like this (change the mailserver host IP to the right IP address)

MX records take a bit of time to change. The following python snippet will bind itself to port 25 and handle any incoming mail.

from smtpd import SMTPServer  
import asyncore  
import email

class TempySMTPserver(SMTPServer):  
  ## gets called on every new email
  def process_message(self, peer, mailfrom, rcpttos, data):
      #print "peer "    + str(peer      )
      #print "mailfrom" + str(mailfrom  )
      #print "rcpttos:" + str(rcpttos   )
      #print "data"  + str(data)

      ##returns a parsed email object
      parsed_email = email.message_from_string(data)

## bind the server to mail port 25
smtp_obj = TempySMTPserver(('0.0.0.0', 25), None)     

try:                        asyncore.loop()  
except KeyboardInterrupt:   pass  

Finally, each email can contain multiple bundled types such as HTML and plain text. while processing, it is easier to keep track of each type separately.

To avoid a specific ORM configuration, I left out the database insert statements, but a working SQLA example is located on github

for email_recpt in rcpttos:  
  email_username = email_recpt.split("@")[0]

  ##find an existing email_account for this username
  #existing_account = TO-DO

  ## this function is a bit weird, returning a string if only one payload
  pay_loads =  parsed_email.get_payload()

  ## if we are dealing with only 1 payload, convert to array to simply the loop
  if type(pay_loads) != list:
      pay_loads = [pay_loads]

  email_subject    = parsed_email["Subject"]
  html_content = ""
  text_content = ""
  mail_from        = mailfrom

  for recieved_email_type in pay_loads:
      if type(recieved_email_type) == str and parsed_email.get_content_type() == "text/plain":
          text_content = recieved_email_type
      elif type(recieved_email_type) == str and parsed_email.get_content_type() == "text/html":
          html_content = recieved_email_type
      elif recieved_email_type.get_content_type() == "text/plain":
          text_content = recieved_email_type.get_payload()
      elif recieved_email_type.get_content_type() == "text/html":
          html_content = recieved_email_type.get_payload()

  ## TO-DO
  ## insert email_subject,existing_account,html_content,text_content,mail_from into DB
  ## TO-DO

The Flask application is quite standard and consist of only two routes.