PowerMTA Email API

Submit emails to PowerMTA with HTTP and JSON instead of SMTP and MIME.

The Email API is used to submit email messages for delivery. You specify address headers, subject, text, and html. The Email API assembles the email, encodes it according to the appropriate standards, and submits it to PowerMTA.

Getting started

Start on PowerMTA server with:

pmtaemailapi -listen 127.0.0.1:8000 -pickup /var/pickup

Submit email messages by posting JSON to http://127.0.0.1:8000/messages.

curl http://127.0.0.1:8000/messages -d '{"from":"postmaster@sender.com","to":"nobody@example.com","subject":"Test","text":"This is a test"}'

API reference

The JSON message object can contain the following name/value pairs:

Name	Type	Description
sender	string	Envelope sender address
from	object/string	Address to use in from header
to	array/object/string	Address(es) to use in to header
cc	array/object/string	Address(es) to use in cc header
bcc	array/object/string	Address(es) to use as bcc
subject	string	Subject line
text	string	Content for text part
html	string	Content for html part

An address can be specified as object or as string. An address object contains the following name/value pairs:

Name	Type	Description
name	string	Display name
address	string	Email address

All strings are expected to be encoded as UTF-8. Display names are MIME word-encoded if needed. Text and HTML bodies are transfer-encoded with quoted-printable.

There is no access control. Make sure that the API is listening on private IPs or use a firewall.

Example code

Python

Install requests library with easy_install requests.

import json
import requests

url = "http://localhost:8000/messages"
headers = {'content-type': 'application/json'}
payload = {
        'from': 'Jim <jim@foo.bar>', 
        'to': 'you@example.com',
        'subject': 'test',
        'text': 'This is a test'}
r = requests.post(url, data=json.dumps(payload), headers=headers)
print r.status_code
print r.text