Parsing Emails?

[furious5]

Just wanted to bounce this off some people and see what they thought.

Basically I am working on a project at the moment, where a user wants to be able to send an e-mail to a special e-mail address and the content of the email is then added to a database.

Now I've never done anything like this before but I'm guessing I would need to use an XML e-mail and then parse the XML in to the PHP document from here I can manipulate the information as neccesarry.

My main problem is getting my head around how I would monitor the mailbox and process the e-mail.

Sorry if this is a bit vague at the moment.

Any advice, links to tutorials would be awesome.

[Wynder]

Depends on the system you're running -- if it's linux based, it's really simple, check out procmail; you can write a recipe to parse your emails as they come in -- even select ones based on content, headers, subject lines... whatever, and call a routine to handle them.

With windows it will be considerably harder. :0 Good luck.

[furious5]

Yes it is definately a Linux platform.

I've found a few classes which will handle connecting to POP3 from PHP but I will also have a look at procmail.

Basically I am thinking of creating an XML based e-mail and just reading the variables from that and putting it in the database - this bit should be fairly feasible - it is just the connection to POP I am struggling with.

Someone else I have spoken to on the subject has suggested using IMAP instead.

[jpr]

could you pleae share where you found those classes for parsing pop3 emails? I am looking for a similar idea. Thank you for your help!

Jason

[furious5]

Check out PHP Classes - http://www.phpclasses.org/