Control PyKota by email with pkmail
Last modified on $Date$
pkmail is an email gateway which allows you to control
PyKota using email messages.
For now, this command can't do more than print quota reports, but more
powerful functionnalities are planned for a future release.
Installation
Contrary to other commands included with PyKota,
pkmail is not meant to be used from the command line,
but instead launched from your mail server when particular messages are
received.
In order to achieve this, the easiest way is to define a special
email alias. Every message received on this address will cause your webserver to automatically
launch pkmail, passing the message's content on pkmail's standard input.
The name of the email alias is completely free, let's call it pykotacmd for example.
Now edit /etc/aliases with your favorite text editor and enter the following :
pykotacmd : "|/usr/bin/pkmail"
Finally, tell your mail server that new aliases are available. To do so, at the command prompt just
type :
$ newaliases
But to be useful, pkmail must be able to read PyKota's
pykotadmin.conf configuration file. A simple way to do so is to put the system
user your mail server runs aliases commands as into the pykota system group, then
restart your mail server software.
Tip
Depending on the software you use as the mail server, additional work may be needed. For example
Exim doesn't by default initialize all the groups when launching a
command from the /etc/aliases database. Please refer to your mail server's
documentation for details.
Usage
Now that pkmail is installed, we can use it by sending email messages to the address
pykotacmd@yourmailserver.example.com. This command will then process your request,
and send the result back to you by email.
For now, pkmail only accepts commands in the Subject: field
of the email message you send to it.
pkmail is still in a pretty experimental state, and only recognizes a single command :
report
The report takes an username as its only optional argument. So for example to
receive a print quota report for user jerome, you'll just have to send
an email message with report jerome in the subject.
Reference
pkmail
-v--version
-h--help