Re: [Gnumed-devel] lab data fetcher/importer connection methods

[J Busser]

At 7:23 AM +0100 2/16/05, Karsten Hilbert wrote:

> > is is straightforward
> > to set up the server to poll the mailbox
> Precisely the way you poll your email
> now.
> > are special software packages
> required to process S/MIME email
> It is plain old email. It is just the *content* that's
> encrypted. For processing the *content*, yes you need
> tools.
> Those are OSS available.

Herein I use "?" in case I am using the wrong term(s). I don't want to eat up people's time, so don't reply if it would be better for advice or explanation to come from whomever I find locally to provide a solution for me. I am only not sure how much I should know to ask (or direct) them for a solution that would do more than just serve me, i.e. align with what others would find desirable for gnumed.

Not having run email "from" a server, my only familiarity with automated polling is using desktop client software in which it's straightforward to store one's userid and password and set a schedule as well as triggered behaviour (post-processing options).

I appreciate that userids and passwords could be written into (e.g.) a shell script, however the package being run to fetch the mail would presumably need to have "hooks"(?) by which the userid and password could be issued from the shell. Or maybe I am just not yet familiar enough, and whoever is configuring the server would login as the email account owner, run a command-line email package and within that package set up both polling and exporting of the fetched email contents into a directory, so that it becomes available to gnumed.

And before it can be imported into gnumed, a script (maybe cronned?) would have to look for and find new contents within a lab results directory, running any files that were present against OSS tools to process the content. Maybe the output is tidily written into a different directory, for a gnumed lab importer to poll?