Piping email coming through to a script

[Anon]

I am trying to make emails coming through a specific alias on my domain directed to a script for parsing. How could I do this?

[yojimbo]

If I understand correctly it sounds like a pretty interesting task.

If the email is actually going to a pop account, you could probably use sockets within php to connect to the mail server and retrieve the email to and work some PHP magic on it.

Drawbacks are you have to have PHP compiled with socket support, and you'll have to hit the php parsing page pretty regularly. Or you could use the CGI module version of php and put it in a cron script.

I'm sure there are other ways to do this and hopefully someone posts them!

So if I'm anywhere near base on this one, why wouldn't you use something more traditionally application oriented like perl,python, etc?

[Anon]

Yup! It's an interesting task. Yea, I won't mind having it done via POP3, but for some security matters, our hosting folks won't create POP3.

However, we can do forwarding, which gives me an idea. The emails could be forwarded to a free POP3 account and the cron script can check the POP3 email for new emails and parse it accordingly.

Still it's limiting because we have over 1,000 users for the portal and need to provide a unique service for each in which a seperate account is given to each of them.

There is something call aliases on *NIX systems, but requires users generated. I want to know if there is a particular application that can intercept the emails to a domain and pipe them into another script for parsing into a database.

[yojimbo]

Well I know that if the mail server is configured so that all email gets sent to a generic account at a domain, if the headers stay intact (most importantly the original 'To:' field) you should be able to retrieve the emails and run them though an application that hooks up to a database. I don't know about their being an application already out there, but it should be fun to write.