datovka2email
=============

Script for unattended downloading and e-mailing of all sent and received
messages in the "Datove schranky" system.

Background
----------

Since 2009, an electronic messaging system is in use by all Czech state
authorities.  It's called Datové schránky (Data boxes) or Datovky (informal,
plural) and the goal was to replace the paper correspondence.  Everyone can
have his/her own Data box, but official institutions and other subjects like
legal entities in the Commercial Register, attorneys or tax consultants are
obliged to receive documents through their Data boxes.

While the Data boxes system uses the Internet as a carrier, the protocol is
independent of any commonly used systems such as E-mail despite the fact how
close is the incentive and usage.

CZ.NIC is an interest association of legal entities, founded in 1998 by
Czech leading ISPs.  The key activities of the association include operation
of the CZ top-level domain as well as its registry.  It also conducts public
education.

CZ.NIC Labs is, among other stuff, developing the Datovka GUI app, which is
user friendly, multiplarform, feature rich and can be used for all usual
Data box management tasks.  It is open sourced, written in Python and split
to libraries so everyone can study and extend the code.

The author of this script has no connection to CZ.NIC.

One feature that is commonly requested by users is missing though:
forwarding all newly found received and sent Data box messages to a given
e-mail.  There are several commercial services for that, but they of course
need access to your Data box.

The `datovka2email' script adds this feature for free. Unfortunately
`datovka' can't be sufficiently governed from the command line, it also has
no plug-ins support, so it is hacked to certain extent.

Requirements
------------

`datovka' package from https://labs.nic.cz/page/969/datovka/ and other
packages it requires.  Tested and works with datovka versions 2.1.2 through
3.0.2.

Developed and tested on Linux. No known limitation for running on other
Operating systems.  Please report.

Running
-------

The goal is to simply run `datovka2email' to automatically download, store
and e-mail all new messages.  To accomplish that several steps needs to be
done.

First you configure the accounts of interest using the `datovka'
application.  That will create proper dsgui.conf configuration file.
DON'T FORGET TO ALLOW STORING THE PASSWORDS in the file!

`datovka2email' relies on the data files in the ~/.dsgui directory managed
by `datovka'.  Only messages that were not previously downloaded there can
be sent to e-mail.

Then you set the constants in the script code:

   SMTP_SERVER - hostname or IP address of the SMTP server accepting mail from you
   SMTP_SENDER - e-mail address to be put to From: header and envelope
   SMTP_RECIPIENT_FOR_SENT,
   SMTP_RECIPIENT_FOR_RECEIVED - e-mail addresses where sent/received
                                       messages will be sent

Please note: The sent e-mails `Date' header is matched to the date of the
source Data box message.  The list of attachments is added to the message
body, which is also switched to quoted-printable encoding.  The accents are
stripped from the attachment filenames to help e-mail processing software
that is not accents friendly.

While this program starts the GTK graphical interface, it does its best to
be run unattended.  The main UI loop is not started, instead the required
actions are forced just after start.  Then the app is ended.  The exceptions
are printed to stderr.

On a server without X, it is possible to install the `xvfb' package and run
`datovka2email' like this:

     xvfb-run datovka2email.py

Also it is recommended to use locking in order to avoid simultaneous executions.

Author
------

Vlada Macek <macek@sandbox.cz>, dev started in Sep 2012