interesting email functionality

timothyr

So, here's something my client has asked for, that I have no idea how to do.

She is set up with web-based email, in order to receive sensitive emails without the contents ever hitting her in-house email servers. She wants to be notified at her in-house email address whenever an email is recieved at the web-based address.

It can't just forward the message on... can you think of any way to do this?

Thanks for any ideas!

tha_mink

This would be possible but she would have to start the script somehow. I couldn't imagine a php cron job running. Why doesn't she just check her web based mail account.

I know HUSHMAIL can do this but it needs to be set up on the web based mail server. Are you handleing her web based mail or is it through yahoo or the like?

Seems kinda funny...Send me mail so I know I have mail?

PS...where is the mail comming from...if your (her) site is sending the mail to her mail account...you could easily do it but I assume that isn't the case.

timothyr

I know, it's kind of wacky, eh?

I have done PHP cron jobs before - to run MySQL queries on a schedule, to grab content from other sites, etc. You can use wget or lynx as the cron job to call the script.

I gues I'm just going to do a cron job that has PHP check the size of the mailbox, and if it's greater, send a notification, and if it's the same or less, just note the new size.

Unless anyone out there has a better idea?

metin

You are not telling anything about the OS of the client
or the mail system (pop3/imap) used!
But since your are talking about checking the mail box size
I assume you can contact the mail server handling the web-based mail directly (trough pop3/imap)!

In this case, it would be possible to have a small "mail check" application
(there are many free ones, the feature also exist in f. ex. ICQ)
that connects to (web)mail-server and check for any new mail!

Or if you want to do it your self with Php,
you could use imap/pop/nntp-functions available!

Begin here:
http://www.php.net/manual/en/ref.imap.php

timothyr

The client OS really shouldn't matter, should it? They want email notification when their web email address gets mail. The Web system is iManager, and it is POP3.

Thanks for the lead.

metin

The client OS would mater if you where going to run the
application on the client's desktop system!
Which would be easiest since you will just have to get one of the many free applications
that check for "new mail" available f. ex. for both Windows and Linux!

But if you want to make a more universal solution then this would be
to develop application that runs on a server that periodically connects to
the server handling the web-mail and in case of new mail for a given account
sends a mail for pre-configured mail address and tells mail address-owner that he/she
has new mail on the other server!
This can be done as I already said with Php or any other language you like.
If you have control of web-based mail system you can probably add this as feature
for any of the users on system!