Intercepting email?

[Anon]

Hi,

I have a general question regarding email and how to intercept it. I would like to program a simple email mailing list but I can't find any documentation on doing it.

I want to be able to run a script whenever a mail comes in to a certain email address on my server? Or I could run a script at fixed time intervals. How is this possible?

I don't have shell access on my server so I can't set up a cron job or anything like that.

I am assuming that I can't really use PHP for the intercept part but I was hoping somebody had set up something like this before?

Best regards,

Marc

[[deleted]]

No shell access, that leaves you with things like POP and SMTP.
Without the cron, setting things up to run periodically is tricky.
You could make a script run and sleep() for a while, but that's not a good solution.

[Anon]

What I am trying to do is make it possible to change my website via my phone. I want to be able to send an SMS to my email account, have a script read the email and update the webpage. This would be easy if I had cron access. Would it be possible to set up a cronjob via the system function in PhP? I am not too familiar with UNIX in general, so I am not too sure how permissions work for things like this.

Regards,

Marc

[[deleted]]

The problem is that without the cron, you can't schedule a script to look for email every X minutes. And without shell access, you can't tell your server to re-route email to a PHP script.
That means you need some other way of triggering your PHP script to parse the email.

One way (one bad bad naughty bad way) would be to start a script that 'never ends'. All it would do is check for email, go to sleep for 5 minutes, check email again, sleep 5 minutes, etc..
Problems:
- if it ever crashes, it won't re-start automatically
- it ties up system-resources (not polite on a non-dedicated server)

If I were you I'd contact the system administrator to see if you can get him to
let you use the crontab, or better yet, get him to setup an email reroute to a PHP script.

[Anon]

Thanks for the reply. How do you reroute an email to a php script? This what I would really like to do. I have been trying to find out about mail servers and stuff, but I can't find any good documentation which explains what does what and how to do the email rerouting. What I have found out from the sysadmin is that it is a linux server running sendmail and qpopper. I understand that sendmail just sends mail and qpopper provides a pop server. Isn't there another component which accepts incoming mail and puts it in a certain location. Isn't it this program that would do the rerouting? Whats this called?

Thanks,

Marc

[[deleted]]

Sendmail does the sending and the receiving.
Qpopper just offers a pop interface to the mailbox that is filled by sendmail.

There is a so-called '.forward' file that you cal place in the home-directory of a user. In that file you can define what to do with incoming email, like forwarding to another account, or forwarding to a script. The email is then sent to a script via the std-input.

You'll have to do a google on the exact format, it's been a while since I last did that.

[Anon]

Thanks again Vincent. That gave me exactly the clues that I was looking for.

For others interested in the same thing as I was, check out
http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=7875&lastnode_id=7905
which has a discussion on what I was looking for and some good example code in perl. Nothing yet on PHP, but it should be the same principle.

Regards,

Marc