Pop3 instead of IMAP for this?

[Teach]

Hello! I hope you can help.

We want to make a page called 'mail.php' which will check 5 mailboxes. Our mail server uses POP3, not IMAP and we want this page to return a syntax like this:

[e-mail]:   15 messages, 2 new
[e-mail]: 23 messages, 3 new

The IMAP script we had was:

$mbox = imap_open("{mail.domain.com}", "[e-mail]", "password", OP_HALFOPEN)
or die("can't connect: " . imap_last_error());

$status = imap_status($mbox, "{mail.domain.com}INBOX", SA_ALL);
if ($status) {
echo "Messages: " . $status->messages . "<br />\n";
echo "Recent: " . $status->recent . "<br />\n";
echo "Unseen: " . $status->unseen . "<br />\n";
echo "UIDnext: " . $status->uidnext . "<br />\n";
echo "UIDvalidity:" . $status->uidvalidity . "<br />\n"; 
} else {
echo "imap_status failed: " . imap_last_error() . "\n";
}

imap_close($mbox);

However, our mail server isn't IMAP.
Is it possible for PHP to do this with POP3 instead, what would I need to use?

Many thanks for any help!

[Wynder]

Teach wrote:

Hello! I hope you can help.

However, our mail server isn't IMAP.
Is it possible for PHP to do this with POP3 instead, what would I need to use?

Many thanks for any help!

Sure -- you'd have to create a socket and connect to port 110 of your mail server, then...

USER $username
PASS $passwd

At that point, depending on your mail server software, it may list the total number of messages and how many are new. If not there are other POP commands I can't recall (google POP TELNET).

QUIT will exit the POP interface.

Edit: Just found this -- should be helpful: http://www.devshed.com/c/a/PHP/Socket-Programming-With-PHP/6/

[Teach]

Brilliant, thank you!

One slight thing though... that is working fine, but it says total messages.
Is there a way it could tell us how many are new like I quoted?

Thanks!!!

[Wynder]

You know, I was looking at the RFC: http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1939.txt

And, to be honest, I don't think so -- I mean, it seems like there should. But if you think about it, the whole concept behind POP was that messages were stored locally on your computer so, you could almost assume that anything on the mail server was 'new mail'... it kinda presents some new challenges in an IMAP world. ;/

Wish I could offer more.

[Teach]

Ah so there's no way with POP3 to identify a 'new' message to one simply just stored in the inbox? 🙁

Script is working great though! We set it on our internal IP and my god does that run quicker!!!

Thanks again.

[Wynder]

In that RFC, it lists all of the commands you can run inside of that POP session -- none of them seems to indicate the difference between a new or read message. Because, as I've mentioned, with POP, it was... you downloaded the email to your client and it was deleted from the server. So, anything that was in your inbox was, at that time, a new message.

Now we all mostly use IMAP where mail is stored on the server and those distinctions are much more needed.

[Teach]

Okay, thanks. 🙂

Reading that link now, I don't even see a think to get the date of the last received message, that would've been nice too, but not imperative.

It shocked me about the unread/read thing, because our webmail keeps messages, and it distingushes between opened emails and unread ones.

It's doing the function we wanted. 🙂