Mail Scanning for Attachments?

[timska77]

I'm sorry if this question sounds insane, I really think it is but I'm going to ask anyway. There is a Wordpress plug-in/feature that runs on cron to scan a specified inbox and add the text content of the email as a new blog post.

SO... is there any conceivable way to do something along those lines with email attachments? Like pull image attachments and add them to the database(BLOB?) with the email address?

I apologize again if this question seems like it belongs on a Twilight Zone episode.

[bradgrafelman]

Since it sounds like Wordpress is just acting as an e-mail client, then I would say sure, you should be able to do anything your favorite e-mail client can do.

After all, attachments are sent within the body of the message itself, so if it can get the "text content of the email" then it can get the attachments from the same place.

[sneakyimp]

It is entirely possible for a PHP script to get fancy when checking email, but this requires that you have a script which can talk to a mail server -- probably via POP or IMAP, depending on the server.

The trick here is that email is a rather unstructured data format and different mail clients and servers can behave quite differently. You should most definitely try and use some existing code library to talk to the server and parse out the attachments for you. It would be a pain in the rear to try and rewrite a MIME-complaint mail client in PHP and someone has probably already done it for you.

I would start by looking at the source code of your plugin to see how it gets access to the mailbox. Then try checking out the built-in PHP mail libraries or perhaps search the PEAR package repository for IMAP or POP. I imagine the easiest way would be to take your current plugin and try to expand it.