PHP E-Mail bot

[ajmoore]

I'm working on a project in which I'm going to need to recieve input via email messages. I'm relatively certain it can be done in php because I've seen some autoresponders and things of that nature writting in php in the past. However, I'm not sure where to start with getting the input from the email messages. POP or IMAP wouldn't be effective in this situation because the processing needs to happen fairly quickly without waiting for me to tell the script to check for new messages. Is there a way to forward an email to a script so that it can be processed? Is there another method that can be used to accomplish this? Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks,
ajmoore

[mcrbids]

This would be done on Unix systems by using what's called a "pipe" command in /etc/aliases.

Here's an example:

1) The PHP script must be installed or referenced in a directory called "/etc/smrsh", and must have the execute bit set.

2) In /etc/aliases, you'd have a line like

username "| myphpscript.php";

3) Then, the contents of an email (including headers) is accessable from within the script using the stdin identified.

$fp=fopen("php://stdin", 'r');
while ($line=fgets($fp, 1024))
$in.=$line;

You have to really pay close attention to file permissions, because you are most certainly not going to debug the script as the user it will be running as in production (usually, user "mail")

I hope this helps!