Are there any SMTP to HTTP free services (Email to POST)?

Question

I was pointed to the service smtp2web a while back, but I've been trying it out and it doesn't seem to work. Are there any others out there? Any way to accomplish this in ruby?

I write an email and send it to lanceJpollard@smtp2web and get this response immediately:

Delivery to the following recipient failed permanently:

 lanceJpollard@smtp2web.com

Technical details of permanent failure: Google tried to deliver your message, but it was rejected by the recipient domain. We recommend contacting the other email provider for further information about the cause of this error. The error that the other server returned was: 550 550 Cannot receive for specified address (state 14).

----- Original message -----

MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.231.80.213 with SMTP id u21mr6871412ibk.173.1282618290464; Mon, 23 Aug 2010 19:51:30 -0700 (PDT) Received: by 10.231.185.135 with HTTP; Mon, 23 Aug 2010 19:51:30 -0700 (PDT) Date: Mon, 23 Aug 2010 21:51:30 -0500 Message-ID: Subject: Hello From: Lance Pollard To: lanceJpollard Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary=0015176f0f3495fbba048e88d7b8

asdfasdf

Any ideas?

Update

Duntadada: Sendgrid.

Point a subdomain MX record to our server, we parse incoming emails and post attachments and body contents to your web forms. Useful to have uploads@subdomain.yourdomain.com or interact with users through email.

Answer 1

You could write a small Google App Engine app which receives the email and then posts it to wherever you want using urlfetch.

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/mail/receivingmail.html

http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/python/urlfetch/

App Engine is free unless you have a lot of traffic.

It supports Python or Java, not Ruby though.

Answer 2

I know this is a bit of a plug but I have been developing http://cloudmailin.com to do exactly this. It's currently in beta but the aim is to always have a free version.

Answer 3

I'm using "Zender" which is a free marketing and transactional email service. It provides 2 types of APIs for .NET and PHP developers, you can check it under this link: http://zender.sharptag.com

Answer 4

Another option is https://zapier.com/. They offer a free plan if your usage is low and paid services if you exceed the limited free service. The key advantage is that you can not only receive the emails that then trigger an outgoing HTTP webhook action but you can extract email contents using the connected https://parser.zapier.com/ service. The parsing service will allow filtering out unrelated emails, where only valid contents will then trigger other connected services. Likewise the extracted values can be pass to another HTTP webhook service.