Email Parsing

Anon

Hey all,

I've got a problem that I've been trying to work out without any luck. This is what I want to happen.

I need a script that every 2 mintues checks to see if there is any email waiting on a pop3 account and if there is it grabs one message parses information that I need out of it and then deletes that message. The key is I need it run continuously and check the pop server for mail every 2 or so mintues.

What I can do so far: I've got it to check the pop server, parse the information I need and delete the message.

What I DON'T have: It cannot figure out a way to have it check every 2 minutes.

FYI: I'm on an Apache/Red Hat OS server. If that helps at all.

thanks,
Paul

Anon

you would need to run your scripts as binary and create a cron job to run it every two minutes.

Anon

You can go 2 ways:

Use Linux's cron program to run your program every 2 minutes. This way your program won't be running all the time.
Use PHP's sleep() function to make the script sleep for 2 minutes. You'll have to put the code in an infinite loop then. But this way the program will always be running and taking up RAM.

Diego

Anon

Diego,

Linux's cron job? Does every Linux server have this and if I have access through SSH or Telnet am I able to run a cron job?

more info please??

-Paul

Anon

How do you run a php script as binary?

-Paul

Anon

http://linux.ctyme.com/man/man0305.htm
http://linux.ctyme.com/man/man0307.htm

Anon

And this link is nifty as well.

http://www.newbienetwork.net/content.php?id=55

Anon

Thanks Mark.

I'm just waiting on David above to see how to run/compile php scripts into Binary so that it can run as a cron job.

-Paul

Anon

When PHP is installed as a mod to the webserver, only the webserver can run PHP scripts. To have some other program (in this case cron) execute a PHP script, PHP needs to be installed as a stand alone binary. If you do not have access to the server to do this, you will have to ask your provider to do it for you. In most cases, they probably will not want to do so.

Anon

Could I write the program to do this in say C/C++ or Java... or something else

-Paul

Anon

Yes, but PERL might be easier though.

Anon

Check your account first; any savvy web hoster will offer the CGI version of PHP as an option since it has a different security model and is useful for some scripts even when you have the builtin version.

It's probably /usr/local/bin/php.

And you run your script like this:

/usr/local/bin/php -q yourscript.php

The -q option keeps it from printing out the boiler plate HTML which would be very annoying in a cron job (you would get new email every 2 minutes).

Roger