mhastart.pl - Help script for the MHonArc Email-to-HTML converter |
mhastart.pl - Help script for the MHonArc Email-to-HTML converter
This script, written in Perl, provides some help when using MHonArc <http://www.mhonarc.org/>. It's particularly useful if you run MHonArc on a shared web server without shell access.
By means of mhastart.pl
you can invoke MHonArc from a browser, or let a mailing
list archive be updated automatically.
The script presupposes that the raw email messages are stored in mbox format.
It can be renamed to whatever you like, as long as the server understands that
it is a CGI script that shall be executed. A number of configuration variables
need to be set before running mhastart.pl
.
If you call mhastart.pl
from a browser, and after having entered a
password, you end up at a page that allows you to execute MHonArc commands.
If you just wish to add or remove messages, there are a couple of buttons
that don't require all the arguments to be entered.
When adding messages, and if $pop3
is enabled, the script automatically
grabs the messages (if any) from the POP account, and adds them to the mbox
file, before MHonArc is invoked.
You can also pipe messages directly to mhastart.pl
, and let it update
your mbox file and archive instantly each time a message arrives. Optionally,
if the messages arrive on another server, you can pass them to this script
through a HTTP request from a script on the other server.
If you collect messages from a mailing list on a POP account, you can instead update the archive by invoking this script via cron.
If you use a POP account, but do not let cron invoke the script automatically,
you can place a link to mhastart.pl
on e.g. the main index page with the
query string ?update
appended to the URL. When clicking the link, the
script grabs messages from the POP account, adds them to the mbox file and
the archive, and loads the updated main index page.
A demo installation of mhastart.pl
is available at
http://www.gunnar.cc/cgi-bin/mhonarc/mhastart.pl (password: demo
). Feel
free to send a test message to demoarc at gunnar.cc
and add it to the archive.
This is how a basic MHonArc archiving of a mailing list can be set up by
means of mhastart.pl
:
mhonarc
and mha-d*
) and the
lib
directory to a directory designated for MHonArc, for instance
/cgi-bin/mhonarc
(no editing of any MHonArc files is necessary).
mhastart.pl
, upload the script (in ASCII
transfer mode), and make it executable (typically chmod 755).
That's basically it. Now, when new messages arrive to the POP account, you can easily add them to the mbox file and the archive.
To make use of MHonArc's extensive possibilities to customize the layout of your archive, you need to study the MHonArc documentation.
By forwarding incoming messages to mhastart.pl
, you can make them update the
archive instantly. One way to do it is through a .forward
file as described
at <http://www.mhonarc.org/MHonArc/doc/faq/archives.html#forward>,
replacing webnewmail
with mhastart.pl
. If you don't have root access to
the server, you will likely need to ask your web host to create the forward.
I'm maintaining a MHonArc archive on a server without email service. In that
case, I'm forwarding incoming (to another server) email to a first script,
which sends the messages to mhastart.pl
as HTTP requests. The supplementary
script is available at <http://www.gunnar.cc/mhonarc/mailfwd.pl.txt>.
Before sending a message, that script appends a password, and the subsequent
password check prevents mhastart.pl
from updating the archive with
arbitrary messages.
The latest version of mhastart.pl
is available at:
http://www.gunnar.cc/mhonarc/mhastart.pl.txt
For questions or bug reports regarding this help script, please use the MHonArc Users mailing list: http://www.mhonarc.org/MHonArc/doc/contacts.html#mailinglist
Copyright © 2002-2004 Gunnar Hjalmarsson http://www.gunnar.cc/cgi-bin/contact.pl
This script is free software and is provided ``as is'' without express or implied warranty. It may be used, redistributed and/or modified under the terms of the GNU GPL Licence <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>.
mhastart.pl - Help script for the MHonArc Email-to-HTML converter |