Check Email for Helpdesk?

[elklabone]

I've been thinking about creating a simple PHP Helpdesk for a website which I run.

Two questions:

I saw a commerical PHP Helpdesk program which creates a "thread" with the current help desk issue. Each time a message is replied to by the staff, an email goes out to the customer. If the customer replies to the email, that message is immediately included in the thread in the helpdesk interface.

I asssume they're "checking" a pop mail account with a script somehow. How is that possible? Sounds like a nightmare. What do you when someone messes with the subject line or doesn't include the original response ?

Second Question:
Is there an open-source (i.e. non-commercial) solution available?

Thanks!

Mark

[sarahk]

have you looked at http://sarah.users.phpclasses.org/search.html?words=pop3&go_search=1

most systems I've worked with forward the email to a "human" mail account if it can't be read by the script.

[The_Chancer]

The IMAP functions (also available if using Exchange) can let you do many things, like not only checking for the subject line, but the e-mail address too. All dependant on the system used for the helpdesk, and whether an incremantal mailbox number is used per query.

Also having as Sarah said, a unique number in the subject, which if missing, can either be forwarded to a human box, or the content of the message checked for the unique id, and dealt with accordingly.

It is not that much of a nightmare (just making a similar one myself)

$unseen=0;
$seen=0;
$insert=0;
$which=array();
$ip=gethostbyname("mymail");
$stream=imap_open("\{$ip/imap:143}INBOX", "user", "pass");
$msgs = imap_sort($stream, SORTARRIVAL, 0, SE_NOPREFETCH);
$MC=imap_check($stream);
$MN=$MC->Nmsgs;
for ($i=0;$i<$MN;$i++)
{
	$msg = imap_header($stream, $msgs[$i],80,80);
	if($msg->Unseen == 'U' || $msg->Recent == 'N') {
		if ($msg->fetchsubject=="Insert data BRCCS")
		{
			array_push($which,$msgs[$i]);
			$insert=$insert+1;
		}
		$unseen=$unseen+1;
	}
	else {
		$seen=$seen+1;
	}

}

This will simply check the subject line, but have a look at what can be looked at in the imap_header / imap_headerinfo and take it from there...