Hi,
I have a basic Drupal install and a bunch of users.
How could my Drupal users receive e-mails from the outside world at their address (e.g. [email protected])?
Thank you!
A:
Depending on your SMTP server setup (ie Exchange, php.mail, or local mail clients) A good start would be to:
- Make sure port 25 is open;
update your php.ini to this
[mail function] ; For Win32 only. SMTP = smtp.maildomain.com
fergNab
2010-02-09 05:24:26
That's how you send emails; the OP was asking about receiving emails.
marcvangend
2010-02-09 08:04:18
SMTP is a protocol for sending mail, not receiving. Your instructions will enable sending mail from PHP, not receiving e-mail from the outside world, and are therefore irrelevant and worthy of a downvote.
MaxVT
2010-02-09 08:05:38
Even though SMTP is capable of both sending and receiving (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smtp), I agree with the downvote.
marcvangend
2010-02-09 09:05:53
+2
A:
Drupal is a system for serving web pages, it does not run mail servers. If there is no mail server present on your system, you will need to install one. Once you have a mail server running, you can install a Drupal module such as Webmail Plus to provide a webmail interface for your users.
marcvangend
2010-02-09 08:03:39
Thank you for your comments.I can install a mail server on the machine that's hosting drupal, no problem. I would like to forward the mail to the email address my drupal users have registered with though, not allow them to use drupal as a webmail client.Thank you.
David
2010-02-09 12:23:43
In order to do that, I think you would need a Drupal module that adds a forward rule to the mail server config when a user registers or changes his e-mail address. The Drupal-site of that module would not be really hard to write (see hook_user in the api documentation) but I'm not sure which mail server would be easiest to configure from a php script.
marcvangend
2010-02-09 15:32:31
+1
A:
For the case you describe I think the best way to handle this is to set up a mail server with automatic forwarding, and run a batch process once a day or so that extracts the usernames and their e-mail addresses from your Drupal database's user table. Drupal itself doesn't need to be involved in the actual sending and receiving of e-mail at all.
If you are using the Drupal username as the first part of the e-mail address then your export script could just run a query like
SELECT name, mail
FROM `users`
WHERE 1
as part of a shell script that populates a table of e-mail addresses to forward to. For the correct formatting and configuration of such a file you'll really need to dig into the documentation of your e-mail server.
alxp
2010-02-09 14:23:45
You could also write a Drupal module that updates the mail server whenever a user is created or their email address is changed.
Greg
2010-02-10 20:20:16
A:
Thanks all!
You've put me in the right direction and I ended up writing a script that reads the Drupal's users table and configures the mail server accordingly. I've turned it into a small Python library for WebFaction, available at http://code.google.com/p/drupal2mail.
Hope it's useful for some!
David
2010-02-20 21:20:12