check email script

[cavey]

I recently completed a piece of in-house software for managing my company's customer service work, and it includes a private messaging feature just like this forum. My question is if there is way to download email messages from an email account using PHP, and display them to a page, like to integrate those into the PM feature? The reason is, I have a lot of sales people out on the ground who currently send my office people email orders during the day. I'd rather have those show up in their PM box instead of email, because they have to copy/paste everything into the software anyhow. If I could create a script to read the emails into a PM message, it would help alot. Any ideas or pointers?

[bpat1434]

Well, there are two ways to tackle this:

1.) Send all orders to a catch-all account and pipe the email to a script
2.) Manually open the mail folders and pull out the information you need

I see #2 as an invasion of privacy (seeing as how the system then can read any and all email ever sent / received). #1 is your best option. Basically you'd want to create a new email account (call it "[e-mail]") and then you'd instruct all sales personnel to now send all orders to the new address. This address would do nothing but push the email it receives to a php script that then reads the contents (and any attachments) and adds puts them in the PM box.

Now, separating the messages to go into the PM box can be done a few ways. One is that you just drop a message to all office personnel about the new order. Another is to add a "tag" to the body of the email, say an "ATTN:" line, in which if it's there, it will be forwarded to that persons PM box (searching by first & last name of course, or email address, or username... etc). And a third way is to just take it one step further and just insert the order yourself. Require your sales personnel to format the email in one way, and then if it's not formatted properly, just kick it back to them from the PHP script.

This is no easy task to undertake. You have to make sure paths are right, and learn how to deal with MIME mail, plain text mail, HTML mail, and other junk. And if you're allowing attachments, you'll have to learn how to strip those as well. But if you can devote some good time to it, it's a worthy investment 😉

[cavey]

Yes, that is what I want to do is just have one email address that will receive everything, and one person who will receive it, there's no need to parse it out to other users etc... I would just rather have all communication go thru the software rather than an email client, as it tends to get lost in the mix and, my CS people have to copy/paste the info into the software anyhow to look up the client. I could make the script look for a customer ID number in the message, they are always 8 digits and start with 71xxxxxx so it could turn that into <a href="customer_detail.php?id=71xxxxxx"> so they can just click it to go there.

Now, where do I go to start looking how to pipe the emails to that script, and how to write that script to handle inbound email?

[bpat1434]

Parsing an inbound email is fairly straightforward. Headers and the body should be separated by two new lines "\r\n\r\n" or "\n\n" or "\r\r".

Other than that, I'm kinda lost, and google should be able to help you with the rest.

For piping, google should help you, but it's essentially setting up a forwarder to a script in your control panel (plesk, cPanel).