E-mail reader questions
Posted by EQF on October 13, 2002 at 08:48:10:

This is most of the text of a message which I recently posted to a number of Internet Newsgroups including sci.geo.earthquakes.

The e-mail related questions in this report have to do with some important earthquake research. If people wish to post their responses to a single Newsgroup then I will propose that comp.lang.perl.misc might be the most appropriate one.

A number of people are presently working informally on what is being discussed here in addition to myself. And if these technical problems can be solved then I believe that more people will probably soon become involved with the effort.

GOAL: Earthquake data are listed at the following Web site and other similar sites:

http://wwwneic.cr.usgs.gov/neis/bulletin/

It is possible to have earthquake data like those sent to you by e-mail. What we would want to do is have those types of data sent to a domain (Web site) related e-mail address such as address@ . .org. And each time a message arrives a PERL CGI program running at the domain Web site would extract data such as earthquake time, latitude, longitude, magnitude etc. from the message and store them in a file at the Web site. The CGI program would also automatically add some additional information to each data line. Data copyright formalities would of course be observed.

QUESTIONS:

*** Does anyone know of any Internet servers which allow automatic e-mail reading programs like that to run. We already have a domain on a particular server. But it does not allow you to run preset time activated (cron?) programs. And I have been unable to discover from anyone if e-mail arrival activated CGI programs can be run there or if you can even run any type of CGI program which will read e-mail messages sent to Web site addresses.

*** Does anyone know where to locate PERL modules which are designed to read e-mail messages sent to a Web site address and then store information extracted from them in a Web site file?

A few years ago, several of us were running a Web site on a server which did allow you to do those types of things. However the servers on which I have my present personal Internet accounts apparently do not allow this for those types of Web sites. And as I said, I have been unable to determine if this can be done on another server which is presently in use.

Follow Ups:
     ● Re: E-mail reader questions - EQF  11:55:30 - 10/14/2002  (17041)  (1)
        ● Re: E-mail reader questions - Petra Challus  20:00:57 - 10/14/2002  (17042)  (0)