Reading POP mail

matbennett

Urgh... don't you just love customers!?

Just finished a simple, but rather specialised forum type system that the customer really likes. At the last minute though he says: "Wouldn't it be great if we could email user@domain.com and it just appears in their message board".

Hmmm....

What I think is needed is a script, running off a cron job, that checks specified pop accounts on the server and then inserts the senders details, subject and message into mySQL.

The problem is really that I don't have a clue where to start with this (never touched POP through PHP) and that the client seems to have the idea that this is going to take no time and cost next to nothing.

Anyway, life story aside, does anyone know of any existing code that does something similar to this? I'm Googling away here and not coming up with a great deal.

diego25

never touched POP through PHP

In this case, it will be the other way around. POP will have to touch PHP. Some mail servers allow you to set an account so that when a mail is received in that account, a script/program is run. So in your case, you'd set your mail server to run some script.php whenever e-mail comes to user@domain.com. Then your PHP script will parse the mail message, update database, whatever it has to do to get the message on the board.

Diego

matbennett

Interesting. Hadn't thought of it that way around. Certainly seems to make sense.

Can anyone give a pointer of what to search for looking for information on setting up a mailserver to do this?

Long shot question: Does anyone know if this is possible on a RAQ4 ?

diego25

Check the help files of your mail server...

Diego

mikeatrpi

http://www.evolt.org/article/Incoming_Mail_and_PHP/18/27914/

Post back if it works... I'm curious...

TruckStuff

I was able to get this to work fairly easily with qmail using the link above. The only thing I had to do was to modify the php.ini to point to qmail's sendmail wrapper in ../bin/sendmail.

I am a bit concerned however about having PHP installed as a CGI binary (given the CERT advisory about this). However, I am not running apache on the same box as qmail so I am a bit less worried about it.