[nikkaelle]

I use salmon's predecessor (lamson) to process emails for an email-driven helpdesk system. Emails come in through lamson, are processed based on headers, and either attached to the support ticket they belong to or are routed to an admin for manual processing.

Lamson isn't a perfect fit for the system, but it did make it easy to get started. Unfortunately it also had a number of bugs I had to fix, since the project was defunct. I should check to see if salmon needs those fixes.

[greglindahl]

The traditional way to do this is using software like procmail -- can you comment on what lampson/salmon does better than procmail for your use-case?

[nikkaelle]

The primary uses for procmail tend to be running a fixed set of rules to save mail to various directories or route it as input to scripts.

My use case needs to save it to a database and make various decisions depending on the sate of the database (e.g., send notifications to anyone watching the ticket and update due dates for the support SLA). Since this database access is more efficient if the process stays connected to the database, it's better to have a long-lived process which handles mail as it comes in than to launch a new script on every incoming email.

Lamson serves as both the procmail side and the script side. It's a long-running process that routes the incoming email to the appropriate business logic internally. And since it's in Python, it's easy to integrate with our existing Django database and business logic. It's not perfect, but it works well enough that I'm not actively looking for a replacement.