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

bastien

just write your script as you normally would. you will need POP or IMAP to access the email 'box'...then simply create a cron job (an automated scheduled task) and use that to fire the script to access the accounts and move the data around as needed

ajmoore

I'd rather not use pop or imap because of the fact that the interaction needs to be almost immediate. I don't want the script to have to wait until the next time the inbox is checked for new messages. Is there another way?

bastien

Well there has to be some way to access the mailbox. Whether you use sockets or POP and IMAP, is really indifferent. you could set the cron to fire once a minute...

ajmoore

There has to be another way....Setting up a cron job to pop the mail every minute would be extremely inefficient. I remember reading something at some point about forwarding email to a script and then accessing via standard input....does anyone know how that works? What would I need to do to get started?

weekender

forwarding email to a script or using standard output would still require a script to be triggered. you can't just have a script fire when an email is received - you need to run a script to do that!

so a cron job is the only way to do it. it is in no way inefficient, as a good script may only take 0.01 seconds to run - if that - and running once a minute, that's 0.6 seconds per hour. sad, i know

there really is no other way - either accept the advice people give you or find out the hard way

ajmoore

Nevermind, I just found the article I was looking for...

Note: It IS possible to do this w/out a cron job...Here's the article that explains how

bastien

Hey, that's pretty cool. Thanks for giving the reference to the article.

Note: this of course can also be done with VB, Java, C++ as well as a standalone program