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:

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

If you want to add an attachment:

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

Or for a binary attachment:

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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):

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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.