Maildrop Host


  The Maildrop Host product provides support for sending email from
  within the Zope environment using Maildrop Host objects. Unlike the 
  built-in MailHost object, the sending is done asynchronously from 
  a separate process.

  The advantage is that sending mail from within web pages becomes 
  much faster because invoking the mail machinery can be slow. With 
  Maildrop Host the web page will return immediately.

  Maildrop Host uses a separate Python process to monitor the mail 
  spool inside the product and handle mail in intervals that can be
  set by the administrator. There are separate start scripts included
  with the product which can be used to start this monitor process. 

  Mails that cannot be sent successfully stay in the internal spool. 
  Every attempt to send email is logged to a log file kept by the 
  monitor process. This log file is closed after each maildrop run,
  so it is safe to rotate it without sending any special signals to
  the maildrop daemon.

  The maildrop daemon that delivers mail supports StartTLS and even
  authenticated SMTP.


  **Requirements**

    - a working SMTP server

    - python 2.1 or higher

    - Zope 2.5.0 beta 4 or higher for Maildrop Host up to version
      1.0beta2, and Zope 2.6.0alpha1 or higher for all versions
      after that.

    - A UNIX operating system if you run the maildrop daemon.


  **Usage**

    Follow these steps to use the product after you followed the
    procedures outlined in INSTALL.txt:

      - edit the "config.py" configuration script in the toplevel
        MaildropHost folder to reflect your particular needs.

      - start the mail spool checker by running the "start_maildrop"
        script or with the other start scripts included in the package,
        which can be found in maildrop/bin underneath the toplevel
        MaildropHost folder.

      - instantiate a Maildrop Host instance in your ZODB

      - Now you can create emails using e.g. the dtml-sendmail tag and 
        point the sendmail tag to the Maildrop Host instance using the 
        mailhost="XYZ" argument inside the sendmail tag, or by using
        the MailHost API (see the Zope Help System).

    Instead of using dtml-sendmail and a Maildrop Host instance you can
    create email messages any way you like. As long as the formatting is
    correct (so that the mail spool checker can parse it, see the file
    SAMPLE_MAIL.txt for an example) and you write it to the spool
    directory which is at $MAILDROP_HOME/spool (or $MAILDROP_SPOOL if
    defined) then the mail spool checker will pick it up and try to
    deliver it.


  **Mail file format**

    The format for a mail file (see SAMPLE_MAIL.txt) is very simple. The
    first line contains the recipient address, prefixed by "##To:". The
    second line is the sender address, prefixed by "##From:".

    The next few lines are headers that become part of the message body, 
    they are "To: <recipient>", "From: <sender>" and "Subject: <subject>".
    
    The actual message is separated from the headers by a blank line.