How to Update Data in a Website and Send Files Via Email

jsnyder2k

Does anyone know how some websites give you the ability to send emails to a certain web address and have it update a database or even store attachments in a database? We use Brainkeeper.com for a corporate wiki and I can email files into our website and they are stored in the database.

How do they do that?

Thanks!

Jim

bradgrafelman

On a Unix/Linux/etc. system, mailboxes can be piped to an executable rather than storing the incoming mail to disk. Thus, you can setup a mailbox that executes a PHP script every time the mail daemon receives an e-mail addressed to that mailbox.

Alternatively, you could setup a cronjob (or write your own daemon using a PHP script that never terminates, I suppose...) that monitors a normal mailbox for incoming messages and processes them accordingly.

digitalhuman

bradgrafelman;10950535 wrote:
On a Unix/Linux/etc. system, mailboxes can be piped to an executable rather than storing the incoming mail to disk. Thus, you can setup a mailbox that executes a PHP script every time the mail daemon receives an e-mail addressed to that mailbox.

Alternatively, you could setup a cronjob (or write your own daemon using a PHP script that never terminates, I suppose...) that monitors a normal mailbox for incoming messages and processes them accordingly.

The most easy way is to preroute incomming mail by using procmailrc. You can forward/pipe complete email messages or parts of an email to a script (like PHP or Bash). With this script you can do anything with the message like storing the attachements in a database.

bblais1

This might help: How do I send an email to update a website?

Using our service, you can send emails to quickly and easily update your website instantly. Whatever you put in your emails will appear on your website exactly the way you type it, including special formatting, pictures and other attachments.