Checking a Mailbox

[aaron_karp]

I want to run a cron job that checks my mailbox every 10 minutes and checks for new messages. If it finds a message, I want it to then extract the body and sender of the message which I can then process.

I'm on a shared CPanel style shared host. No virtual root. I see a /mail and /public_html, as well as some others.

Is this possible? If so, how? Thanks!

-Aaron

[TF_TheMoon]

If your mail is stored in one of those folders then yes, though it is more effcient to make the incoming mail trigger a script.

You're find some basic instructions on that on my site here.

But for what you want you just need to create a script that opens the mail files (file_get_contents, fopen etc etc) and then parse the raw mail using PEAR mail:Mime

http://pear.php.net/manual/en/package.mail.mail-mime.php

From here you'll have a object that will enable you to read the mail contents, headers, rebuild the attachments in a controlled manner

[aaron_karp]

I'm guessing I can't get the incoming mail to trigger a script on my shared host, right?

That page on your website looks very helpful; maybe I'll invest in a VPS.

If I simply retrieve my inbox using file_get_contents, I'll just be importing it as a flat file. Then I'd have to a) parse it and b) delete it when I'm done. I feel like the whole thing would result in lost data and sharing violations right and left.