I want to make my gmail box public. I have a gmail account for a website I run and I thought it would be a fun thing if any email that gets sent directly to the website account could be read on the site automatically. Like an interactive web inbox, but they can’t delete anything or change my password or such. But they could read the email, see the attachments, etc. Does anyone know of any such script or program to do this?
I don’t know that there is a way to do this with gmail, but why not implement a blog-style comment area instead and allow public access to post? Wouldn’t that accomplish the same thing? You would just set up a comment form with no restrictions on who can post, and when they hit submit their questions or comments are immediately posted. You’d have to monitor it for trolls and spammers and the like but it seems to me it would serve the same purpose.
it’s the whole thing of making it look like an inbox that is the aesthetic i’m trying to go for, rather than a comments section. it’d be funny to be able to read all the spam messages i get for the email address as well. etc. etc.
You should be able to alter the CSS or HTML output to look like whatever you want. Might take some tweaking but I imagine it could be done fairly easily.
If there is a way to have email published straight to the web I don’t think you’ll be able to do it directly from Gmail. Some blog or journal software allows you to post by email, and you are given an email address to send your posts to. You might try looking for a program with that capability and then setting the account to forward all mail to that address.
More specifically, here is information on how to <A HREF=“Create, edit, manage, or delete a post - Blogger Help”>post to blogger via email</A> and a <A HREF=“http://www.alevin.com/weblog/archives/000764.html”>python wrapper for movable type</A> to post by email.
Blogger is more straightforward and easier to use if you’re not familiar with the software, but Movable Type is more customizable, I think. I’ve worked mostly with Movable Type so I’m not sure to what extent you can customize blogger. You can embed MT in your site, and you have access to the stylesheet and HTML output so you could mimic your inbox, or set it up however you like.
Crud. Excuse my HTML coding here. Wrong code :smack:
I don’t think it’d be out of the realm of possibility for a script to log in to gmail via POP3, then to download all the mail, and repurpose it into a web page…
the blogger email thing seems like a halfway solution, two problems are incurred however: 1) you can’t see the email address that posted the entry (i think), and 2) you can’t see any image attachments. :\