Running a Command When Receiving an Email

Introduction link

There’s a very useful feature that can be easily implemented: launching a command or script when receiving an email.

Usage link

Sending an Email link

You can send an email in the following way:

  echo "body" | mail -s "subject" test@test.com
  

If you want to add an attachment:

  mailx bar@foo.com -s "HTML Hello" -a "Content-Type: text/html" < body.htm
  

Or for a binary attachment:

  uuencode archive.tar.gz archive.tar.gz | mail -s "Emailing: archive.tar.gz" user@example.com
  

Receiving an Email link

To use this procedure, edit the aliases configuration and add a line like this (/etc/aliases):

  test: "|touch /tmp/test"
  

When you send an email to your server with the recipient test (e.g. test@fqdn), the touch command will be executed.

Note: Don’t forget to run newaliases after making changes.