GetMail API

PageGate's GetMail Interface allows you to receive SMTP/Email traffic and translate it into outbound messages in a different format.

For example, you could email a message to PageGate to have the program translate that email into messages to cell phones, other email addresses, pagers, web APIs, or a mix and match of it all. As an added bonus, the GetMail interface also allows you to setup automatic mail forwarding and allows you to host a full email domain with mailboxes if needed.

PageGate has a fully functional mail server engine as a core part of the program but without the GetMail module, you only ever access the outbound functions of this mail server. The GetMail module unlocks the receiving/inbound portion of the mail server engine.

GetMail can receive email/SMTP messages in one of a few ways:

•Have PageGate function as a relay server and trap certain messages for translation while allowing everything else to flow through your normal email environment.

•Have PageGate host an email sub-domain off of your existing email domain, that way all traffic to that sub-domain is routed to the PageGate server

•Have PageGate use POP to collect messages from an email address

The best methods of email integration are to have PageGate either function as a relay server or host a sub-domain off of your existing domain. POP mail collection is still viable but notably slower than the closer-to-real-time relayed and hosted methods.

Simply enabling the GetMail interface is enough to allow PageGate to receive incoming SMTP connections. By default, the mail server listens on port 25 but you can customize this to other ports with or without TLS/STARTTLS enabled. We've even added OAUTH support to version 11's mail server! For more information about how to configure GetMail, have a look at the GetMail section of the version 11 manual.

To have PageGate host an email domain or sub-domain, you'll want to talk to your email server administrators and ask them to create a sub-domain for you, then redirect the MX record for that sub-domain to the internal IP address of the PageGate server.

As an example of why you might do this, let's say that you have an email domain of whatever.com (and that your email addresses are something@whatever.com). You could have messaging.whatever.com created and redirected to PageGate's IP. As soon as you do, every recipient and group in the program becomes a valid email address.

So, let's say that we have a recipient called sales and we have GetMail configured to use messaging.whatever.com. You could send an email to sales@messaging.whatever.com and that email would come in to PageGate, then get processed as an outbound message for the recipient named sales.

As a final option, GetMail also supports the POP protocol and this allows it to periodically check POP enabled email addresses, then read in any email waiting in the mailbox and deliver that traffic to a recipient or group of your specification.

With the ubiquity of email, more and more modern applications are integrating the ability to send email.  If your application has the ability to send email, it can easily be integrated with PageGate by using PageGate's email interface.  It is worth noting that this interface can be used to integrate  applications running on different platforms (Unix, Mac, etc.).  For more information, please refer to the GetMail section of this manual for more details.