email fetching data and updating

veer007

HI, I have a DB with certain data,
when a user sends a blank mail to a particular mail id it should authenticate its mail id with the DB and auto send him the data from the DB (what to data to be send will be fixed). then the user can update the details in the same mail and reply back to the DB and the DB should get affected.

Instances
1. blank mail from user to DB mail
2. His mail id will be authenticated with the DB
3. His data is sent to him
4. He amends changes and reply's back that mail (only few fields should be amendable)
5. The Db gets updated on mail received.

could some one please help me how to work on this.

Ashley_Sheridan

Why do you want to do this all over email? What you want to do sounds like it's going to be incredibly tricky, especially the part where people update the text in an email and the server is meant to make sense of that. You could force the email to be in plain text, but if the end user decides to change the layout even a bit then it could break in your script, and a lot of email clients forcibly insert new lines into plain text emails where lines go beyond a character limit (typically 80 characters)

This could be far more easily accomplished with a web-based form rather than email. After all, the user still needs an Internet connection for both, and you won't have to spend a lot of time messing around with parsing raw emails in PHP.

veer007

agreed Sir,
but we have a requirement which says when a user sends an blank email to a particular address it should auto reply back with some data pertaining to him from the DB.
he then replies back with some data in the pre-built table in the email which will be added to the DB on his reply.
I totally agree with your points, but please help me out here.

johanafm

There should allready be threads here which discuss how to setup incoming email to be handled by PHP.

Ashley_Sheridan

I think you may run into impossible-to-solve difficulties when you want to process replies that contain various "fields" of information though. You can't put a form in an email (the values don't get saved anywhere when the reply gets sent), so you'd have to rely on sorting lines of text in the reply. I'd probably send the email as plain text to make this easier (and avoid some of the lovely formatting WTFs that you can get from email clients) but what will you do if the end user decides to switch to HTML formatting because they think it's prettier or that the bits they've just highlighted in red are their reply?

Your time might be better spent trying to convince the person asking for these requests to do it a better way, and maybe try to find out what issue they think they're solving by doing it this way.