Web technology to handle incoming emails?

cedricdj

Ok, this is a total shot in the dark - bar having my own email server (which is not an option), I have no idea how it would work, but maybe someone here would... I'm looking for a way to have emails sent to a specific adress (which I can access via POP or IMAP) be handled by a little coding on my own, resulting if some criteria are matched in the posting of a web form (if anyone is wondering, this is to have emails relayed as SMSs via a web SMS service).

Now, I could do that fairly easily by having some script or program running on a machine I own checking that email every so often, but I'm not keen a solution that requires one of my computer to be on 24/24 7/7. Otherwise, I have a professional hosting service with PHP I could use, but it doesn't support cron jobs...

Would anyone here know of some kind of service I could use for something like this? Something as simple as a tool requesting an URL of my choice every minute or so should be enough, as I could then use it to have a PHP script executed on my website doing the actual job...

Any help very welcomed.

MarkR

The way I've done it in the past, is have the mail delivery agent execute a PHP application by way of a pipe on each incoming message. PHP then reads the message and decides what to do based on its contents.

The method required to do this is specific to each delivery agent. On a lot of (Unix-like) systems it will involve a file in the user's home directory such as .procmailrc or .forward which contains some instructions how to run the process via a pipe. You may find it convenient to write a shell script wrapper which changes to the right directory etc, and invokes PHP properly.

Mark

cedricdj

The problem with this approach is that it would require access to the mail server, which I do not have. I am more and more thinking that the simplest would be to have a PHP script using the imap_* functions do the job. The only problem is having that script being executed frequently without cron job - surely someone must know of a service somewhere that can do that? Like an uptime checker for a particular URL or something like that?