Parsing E-mail

Anon

Hey everyone!

I am looking for some help in parsing e-mails. Basically, I want all e-mail sent to a certain address at our site to be parsed by a PHP script. I know how to and that I need to pipe the e-mail address to the script (using "| /location/of/script.php") but I am unsure of what I need to actually put into the script for parsing the e-mails (grabbing the From:, To:, Subject:, and Body: fields in particular). If anyone has successfully done this or knows how to, or if anyone has seen a script that does it, I really would appreciate some pointers.

Thanks for your help in advance!

Chad Simper

Anon

Chad, I have to raise the question first: Are you sure PHP is the right tool? (It may be, but often people try to use PHP for non-webpage work when other tools might be more suitable.)

Assuming it is: First, you have to install PHP as a stand-alone program (/usr/bin/php) and get all of that working properly.

Then it's a matter of writing a few regular expressions. Headers are easy; you're looking for the beginning of a line followed by your target tag, a colon, and a space. Everything from there to the first EOL is your value.

The body is only slightly more difficult. The Internet mail standard doesn't define a body tag; it defines the message body as being separated from the headers by a blank line. So what you have to look for is the first two EOLs; grab everything from there to EOF.

Have you worked with regular expressions before? The secret to happiness is understanding the mumbo-jumbo about parenthesized subexpressions.

Anon

Steve,

I appreciate your reply.

Is PHP the right tool? I don't know. I am currently considering both PERL and PHP - I would like to know how to do it in PHP even if I do opt for PERL. Even though I do personally think PERL is more for the job, I'm not a PERL guru yet.

Your post definitly helped out in terms of the PHP side of things... What you explained is exactly what I was thinking would have to be done but I was curious if PHP had some special tools that could parse an e-mail more efficiently. If regexps (which I have a lot of experience with in PHP and a little in PERL) are the one and only way to go, that's what I will look at.

At this point, the script wouldn't handle more than 50 e-mails per day, but it will definitly grow to dealing with well over 500 a day eventually. For now, I believe PHP is up for the job but as time goes on and the incoming e-mail increases, I may port to the script to PERL as I hope to have a much better understanding of it then.

Once again, I appreciate your reply as it greatly helped me out and backed my previous conclusions.