In this blog post I’ll tell you a little about a smart tool called Mail2Most. It connects email servers with the chat system Mattermost.
Mattermost
Mattermost is a chat tool which can be self-hosted. Also it allows us to protect our internal communication by encryption. Due to that and other possibilities some years ago we decided to use it here at ePages.
Mail2Most
You may also know the problem of having a bunch of email accounts that you might use for logging things, support questions, or other stuff that you do not see directly. You know that with emails things are sometimes chaotic. So why not filter these emails and send them directly to certain channels or users of your chat system, because that’s what people usually use today … chats 😃.
That is exactly what Mail2Most does. Before I created Mail2Most, we used a similar system called mattermail. It did the job quite well, but it was archived over a year ago. Also it didn’t support some of the things we need. So I did what I always do when there isn’t a tool that does the job I wanted it to do: I wrote it from scratch. That brings us back to our Mail2Most.
How to use it
Using Mail2Most isn’t that hard. You can just download the latest release and check the example configuration. You can start with Mail2Most by configuring a default profile which provides reusable defaults for your actual profiles. Of course, such a profile needs a configuration for your mail server and your Mattermost, because it has to read emails and send parts of them to your Mattermost server. Also you can define filters for your emails that allows you to:
- filter for specific folders
- only send emails when they are flaged as unseen
- filter by From and To fields
- filter by subject
- or just send emails that are not older than a specific time range
For your Mattermost server you can define:
- channels to send messages to
- users to send messages to
- if you only want to send the subject of the email or also include the body
- strip HTML tags for some more security if you want to
- messages start with the sender’s address (default setting) which can be disabled also
For authentication it supports username/password as well as oauth using a personal access token.
On the email side you just need to provide the credentials. By default the Imap connection is TLS encrypted which can (but should never) be disabled. Also you can set the email server to read-only which prevents Mail2Most from setting email flags.
Profiles! We need more profiles!
When you configured the defaults you can reuse these defaults (or overwrite them) in your actual profiles. If you just want to use the defaults as they are, just create an empty profile.
Multiple profiles are possible as well. So you can create different filters for the same or different email servers, or combine any configuration possibilities as you want.
Can I use it? Is it free?
The whole project is open-source and licensed under MIT. You can even reuse the code if you want to. Of course it’s free as well 😀. Mail2Most can be run as it is or by using docker, docker-compose, or systemd. In the future I will provide a helm configuration also to run it with Kubernetes. If you find bugs, have questions, or want more features simply open an issue or create a pull request.
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