Laconica Microforum Accept Posts by Email

You can post to your Laconica instance via email. Extra steps are needed to use email-related functionality.
On *nix platform servers if you are running sendmail email is configured in the /etc/mail directory in files virtusertable and aliases. Skip the rest of this if you run Windows or qmail.

In /etc/mail/virtusertable either modify or add the line to route ANY unrecognized address to the Laconica mailerdaemon, which is not a daemon at all but a filter.

@yourdomain.tld laconica_mail_script

In /etc/mail/aliases add this line using the full path to the file in the Laconica distribution

laconica_mail_script: "|/full_path_to_your_installation_/scripts/maildaemon.php"

Make sure this file is executable and if it isn't, do this:

chmod +x path_to_it/maildaemon.php

What the above does is this: if an email arrives that is not for an address listed in virtusertable, it will be passed to the filter included in Laconica, a file called maildaemon.php

What the filter does is check the address against the list of valid users and if it finds it, and if the email is coming from the associated address, it publishes the email contents as a post.

Note that if your address is compromised, it's trivial to then spoof the From email and post to your account. Laconica should probably add a password to the title of emails sent to it.

Note in passing, you can run several Laconica instances on different domains on one server and use one domain to send the mail. All that is configured in the config.php file.

Speaking of email, Laconica currently uses email to send SMS. On my particular provider, all I get is a free SMS with "you've got mail" heads up, so it isn't too useful, but if your provider allows SMS via email, you might want to try this. In the meantime, the email post allows you to talk to your Laconica instance from your cell if browsing is not comfortable (i.e., you don't have a modern phone, which I do not) or if browsing is too expensive.