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May 13, 2008
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Plesk, Email Piping/Email Pipe (osTicket / Trellis)

I was trying to get email piping working on a RHEL server that runs Plesk (8.3), and I was having no luck. I just wanted to test out both the osTicket and Trellis support ticketing apps, but I had the toughest time getting either to work well on Plesk.

I did finally get it working for osTicket, both locally and remotely.

You’ll need to modify your

/var/qmail/mailnames/[domain]/[address]/.qmail
file. By default, mine looked like this:

| true
./Maildir/

To get piping working, all I did was add the following:

|true
|/path/to/pipe/handler.file.php
./Maildir/

There were some gotchas:

  • Make sure the handler file has executable permissions, and make sure that its full path has executable permissions.

    So if your file is in /my/great/file.php then my, great, and file.php will need executable permissions.

  • Some people said quotes were necessary around the piped command (i.e. "|/path/to/pipe/handler.file.php") but I’m not using any, so I’m not sure that’s your biggest problem.

Getting it working with osTicket took quite some time, but it seems to be working great now! I did find lots of info about how easily cPanel handles this type of thing; they offer a nice text input for pipe commands via the admin interface–how convenient!

Here’s a few other resources. They weren’t incredibly helpful, but they did eventually lead me in the right direction:

6 Responses to “Plesk, Email Piping/Email Pipe (osTicket / Trellis)”


  1. alan adı
    2008.11.26

    thank you for the infos…you helped me really :-)


  2. Barry Hunter
    2010.04.02

    Thanks! I couldnt get piping working with plesk, but your post had the exact details that I needed to get it working. (for use with osticket as it happens!)


  3. Ryan
    2010.08.04

    Hi Steve,

    Thanks for your post. But I’m still having an issue enabling the piping on Plesk.

    I think I did everything what you have said but it doesn’t work…

    Do I need to create the email address? For example, if I want to enable the piping for general@domain.com, do I actually create the email general@domain.com?

    Any ideas would be very appreciated!

    Thanks a lot!


    • Steve
      2010.08.11

      I haven’t messed with this in a few years, but I am pretty sure you need to create the email address.


  4. Kogg
    2011.05.06

    Problem I’ve run into is piping any email sent to domain to an application. Even for email addresses that don’t exist. For example, someone sends to does_not_exist@yourdomain.com it gets piped to an application. Anything sent to “yourdomain.com” gets piped. The solution you provide and others I’ve seen that are pretty much the same work if you know the target email address. But if it is to one that does not exist, and you use Plesk (I miss you cpanel), there doesn’t seem to be a solution.


  5. Kogg
    2011.05.06

    Man that is some bad English above.

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