mail status

[matchew]

i need to figure out a way to see if a mail was successfully delivered using php.

my site sends out emails which are then faxed using a 3rd party. they reply to our email account with confirmation that the fax was sent. does anyone know how to create a script that will read emails or at least subjects and mark them read.

if i can figure out how to do this i can update my database automatically, rather than going though hundreds of emails and updating them every couple min.

[Kudose]

I don't think this is possible.

You could use an image in your email that is pulled from a PHP script on your site that updates the database based on parameters passed when requesting the image.

[oldguy]

Not impossible but probably not terribly easy. I would think much depends on which mail server you are using and how it stores the messages.

My mail server knowledge is skimpy at best. But there may be a mail server out there that makes it easier to access its data. I would read up a bit on your current server and investigate others.

Programs such as Spam Assassin intercept incoming messages so maybe you could write (or have written for you) a program/extension/plugin that would examine incoming mail and write to a file or db when a reply from the fax vendor is received. Maybe there is open source code out there that does something similar. You could modify it for your particular use.

All in all, sounds like something best done with something other than a PHP solution.

[MarkR]

You can't tell whether a mail has been delivered. Ever.

A message transfer agent (MTA) will bounce the message if it can't deliver it, and you can intercept the bounce (Which is sent to the envelope-sender of the message).

You can interrogate the MTA queue (if you're root of course) to determine if a given message (Hint: Use unique message IDs) is still in the queue.

However, just because the MTA has delivered it somewhere else, does not mean that it's arrived. That is simply impossible to know.

Mark

[liquorvicar]

Reading your original post, you're not actually trying to see if a mail was sent but rather read incoming mails, right?

If so, you should investigate PHP's IMAP functions. They allow you to log into a POP/IMAP mailbox and read/parse the mail in it etc.