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 is a separate start script 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.


  **Requirements**

    - a working SMTP server that does not require authentication

    - 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.


  **Usage**

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

    - edit the "start_maildrop" script in the maildrop folder to
      adjust the location of the Python binary if needed (the
      default is /usr/local/bin/python).

    - edit config.py in the top level folder to adjust settings 
      such as the SMTP host, polling interval or debug level, these
      settings are used by the maildrop daemon and also read by the
      MaildropHost module during initialization to show them in the
      Zope Management Interface (ZMI).

    - start the mail spool checker by running the "start_maildrop"
      script. 

    - 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.

  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 located at 
  <Zope>/lib/python/Products/MaildropHost/maildrop/spool 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.