PHP read emails?

scraff

How can i get PHP to read an email?

For example, if i was to use an online form that requires the sender to put his first name and some text, then the form sent the email to my email.

The PHP code would get the sender email address, and the first name, and send and store the details in a database.

How would this be done?
Thankyou.

batman

Post the form to a php page. On that page define the variables sender email, and first name. Then do the sql query to put it into the database. Then use a simple if statement to check and see if the query went through or not. If so then use the mail() function to send the email to you. If the query is not successful, then just echo an error. You will also have to, if the query is good, print some kind of message saying the email was sent.

Or however you want.

I'm not sure if this answers your question, because I'm afraid I didn't totally understand it.

Hope it helps,
-Blake

scraff

No this wasnt what i ment totally! thanx anyway.

I ment, to get the values from the email, what i used was just an example, but i wanted it for use in other ways.

I need to read a certain line in an email, say the line with the name on it.

It could be just to read the first line(whatever this may be) in an email and put that in a database, or it could send an email to another address with the first line as the Subject. Whatever the use of it, I just need to get data from emails.

Hope this explains it a bit better!!

Moonglobe

just a clarification:
i think you want a setup so that whenever some emails you (lets say bob@example.com), you want to take that email and stick it into the database. right? i have no idea how to do this, but i think the way you put it wasn't clear.......

scraff

Well...kinda.

Ill tell u what its for. Its for PayPal and when some one buys somthing online, an email is sent with the details of the transaction: The email, delivery address, price, item...

The thing that is bought is a file(contained in a .zip) Instead of having to check the emails then email the file manually, i want to get their email address out of the email, and the item name(which will be "itemx.zip") then it should email the file to the email address, and store it in the database. Once i can work out how to extract the text of a line in an email, i can work the rest out my self!

It obviously can be done, because many sites do it.

Thanks

mo0ness

Do you mean...
Something like hotmail? - so u can receive e-mail online via a php script? yes?

scraff

No, not like hotmail! Damn it, no one knows what i mean!

If you bought a program, or somthing like a small game or a web template online, you would want it stright away, when the customer pays, the PHP script will read the email ofa the email server and send the requested file to their email address.
Understand? Please do!

daveyboy

calm down man.

you haven't explained yourself clearly enough.
so, it appears you want a script to read your email from your POP or IMAP server, find any from PayPal saying someone has bought something, extract the email address and email them the purchased software.

is this correct?

should the script run on the server or you workstation?

should it be a web script or a command line script?

please clarify as much as you can. post some code if you have any.

scraff

Yes, thats what i want!

I want it on the server and if possible, for it to run as soon as a new email arrives.
so a command line script.

I dont have any code, since this step would be the first step that i need to start off with.

Have you any ideas?

Thanx 🙂

daveyboy

okay, is it a linux server or a windoze box?

is the server also your mail server or is that a seperate box?

it's not really possible to be notified IMMEDIATELY, unless you have an account on the mail server.

Assuming it's a linux box, you would probably use procmail (http://www.procmail.org) to process your mail. procmail is a mail filter program. as soon as a mail arrives for you, the server gives it to procmail. you could set up procmail to call your script on the email if it is from paypal.

your script would read the email from stdin, use a regular expression (http://de2.php.net/manual/en/ref.regex.php) to find the relevant filename.

get yourself a mime email class from http://www.phpclasses.org to build an email with the file attached and send it.

if you don't have a shell account on the mail server, you won't be able to set up an IMMEDIATE response - you will need a script which is run every x minutes to check for new mail, probably from cron, if you are using a linux server.

The_Chancer

There is another possible way......

Using the IMAP functions - and assuming that the mailbox isn't local to you the following may help.

A constantly updating page (may take a while to load each time) which does the following in order

1 - Detect for new messages (there is a flag for this in the mail
2 - Look in the headers for the reply-to address
3 - Create mail from you addressed to the reply-to address
4 - Send new mail with the attachment on it to the person in question
5 - Mark the original as read and reload back into the main inbox area.

Update the page every time it reloads... fairly intensive on the server though, and may take a little while to process the script if the mail server isn't that fast (my isp's is cr*p)

But - only another suggestion into the fray...

Oh - and you might have some fun with the MIME types and headers from some peoples mail... expecially if it is an Incredimail type or one with stationary....