Receiving email, Part 2: Processing email with a workspace

As of FME Server 2019+, this functionality can be completed using FME Server Automations. For more information, please see Run a Workspace in Response to Incoming Email. Note that this tutorial series will no longer be updated, if you encounter an error, please contact Safe Support.

Introduction

This article is the second in a three-part tutorial series on receiving emails in FME Server. This section will cover how we can use a workspace published to FME Server via the Notification Service to process and log the details from the incoming email by subscribing to the Topic we created in Receiving email, Part 1.

Prerequisites

• FME Server and FME Desktop installed

• Completion of Receiving email, Part 1

Step-by-step Instructions

Create the Workspace

We will set up FME Server to trigger a workspace to run in response to incoming messages to the RECEIVE_EMAIL topic. There are two workspace templates provided in the Downloads section of this article, respective of whether you set up an SMTP or IMAP Email Publication in the previous tutorial.

The workspace is designed to log all the information from the email as attributes so they can be viewed in the job log through the FME Server web interface.

You can either download the attached workspace template or create this .fmw file yourself using the following instructions.

1. In a blank workspace, add a JSON reader to the canvas. For the dataset select the sample_email_notification_message.json from the Downloads zip file. This is a temporary JSON file that will be replaced by the incoming email.
2. Connect a Logger to the JSON reader. There are two completed workspaces attached, one for SMTP and one for IMAP. The difference between these are the attribute prefixes of the incoming JSON file. Attributes of Emails received by the SMTP publisher are prefixed with email_ whilst the IMAP publisher prefixes the attributes with imap_.

Publish the Workspace

In order to be able to run this workspace using the notification service, we first need to publish it up to FME Server. When publishing the workspace, we have to set the topic to which it will be subscribed and specify which reader will receive the JSON file.

Go to File > Publish to FME Server. Connect to your server, and under the Register Services window check the Notification Service.

Publish the Workspace, registering it to the Notification Service

If you were to receive a new email now you should see this workspace listed under the Completed Jobs tab in the FME Server Web Interface.

Test the Configuration

To test if you have successfully set up the Subscription via registration to the Notification Service, simply send an email to the account you configured in the previous section of this tutorial series. As a reminder for SMTP this will by myusername@myserver.mydomain and for IMAP this is your own external mail account. This should cause the workspace to run, to confirm this you review Job History under Jobs > Completed.

Jobs triggered by the Notification Service list in the Completed Jobs page

Click on the Workspace Name to view the log. Review the log to find the list of attributes stored by the logger, including email subject, content, from and to address.

Example Log file

Email Subject Routing

If you need to take different actions based on the subject of the email - perhaps you are accepting files for different projects - you can filter and route emails to different sub-workspaces. This technique works well if you've set up regex-based subject filtering in the previous section.

If you would like to know more about this option, check out the other sample workspace provided in this tutorial which demonstrates how to use a TestFilter to route emails with three potential different project names in the subject line (FilterBySubject.fmwt).

Use the ‘Contains’ operation to test the email subject based on publisher filter

To set this up correctly, you will also have to return to your IMAP email publication in FME Server and set the Filter Type to Regex and then set the Subject Filter to:

project105|project481|project772 

IMAP publication set filter type to regex

Test the Filter Configuration

To test whether the Filtering has been set up correctly we will send an email with the Email Subject ‘project105’.

1. Open the FilterBySubject.fmw and enable the FMEServerJobSubmitter for project105.

2. In the Parameter Editor select your FME Server connection. For the Repository select Samples and select the austinApartments.fmw.

3. Repeat the steps used above to publish the Workspace to FME Server under the Notification Service. Select RECEIVE_EMAIL as the Subscription Topic.

4. Send an email with the Subject project105

5. Return to the FME Server Web UI and go to the Completed Job History page to check both the FilterbySubject.fmw and the austinApartments.fmw workspace was run.

Email watch topic triggers FilterbySubject.fmw

If you send another email where the subject does not contain ‘project105’ then this will not pass on a topic message so no workspace will be run.

Conclusion

In this part of the tutorial, we created and published a workspace which processes emails. It simply logs the subject line of the email, but in the next part of the tutorial, we will expand it to process email attachments.

Troubleshooting

If your newly configured notification set up is not working as expected you can use FME Server's log files to help narrow down the problem. The diagram below shows how an email flows through each FME Server component and which log files are updated at each point. Check these messages and timestamps in these files to confirm that the email is reaching each component.