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Progress Reports via Email Technical Prerequisites Activating Mails
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Progress Reports via Email

Exoskeleton can send email

  • when it starts,
  • when it reaches a milestone,
  • after it stops.

Technical Prerequisites

Note, that it usually does not work to send email from a system with a dynamic IP address (typically your home computer) as most mail servers will classify them as spam.

Even if you send from a machine with static IP, many things might go wrong. For example, there might be a SPF setting for the sending domain that limits sending mails to a server specified in the MX record of your DNS entry.

Exoskeleton can use a local mail server. It can also connect to the remote mail server of your ISP and send mails via that.

Activating Mails

When you create your bot, you can set the parameter mail_settings which expects a dictionary. The following keys are supported:

  • server (default: 'localhost'): either your local machine or a remote server
  • server_port (default: None)
  • encryption (default: 'off'): either off, ssl, or starttls.
  • username (default: None)
  • passphrase (default: None)
  • recipient (default: None): email address of the recipient
  • sender (default: None): email address of the sender

Obviously mail_admin and mail_sender are required to send email.

If mail_settings are given, the parameter mail_behavior (must be a dictionary) determines when to send mail. The following keys are supported:

  • send_start_msg (bool / default: True): whether to send a start message
  • send_finish_msg (bool / default: False): send a message when the bot finishes (requires that is set up to finish once the queue is empty).
  • milestone_num (int / default: None): Send a mail every time a certain number of tasks has been handled. Setting it to 1000 means, that you get an email after each 1,000 queue items are handled.

send_start_msg defaults to True, so the bot will right away send an email. This is a good way to check whether sending a mail does work. If the receiving mail server uses greylisting, it may initially take some minutes to get this email.

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