Access Email Contents

[kipper]

How does a web server, with a database connect to the emails it receives?

 

How does the web server get the contents of the emails it receives so I can parse it?

 

Thanks

[Daniel0]

The web server doesn't receive any email. That would be the MTA (mail transfer agent). Many Linux based MTAs use the /etc/aliases file to specify where the emails should be routed to. By default it's a user on the file system, but it's also possible piping it to STDIN on a script.

 

This line would send email to something@example.com to to the user daniel:

something: daniel

 

This line would send email to something@example.com to a script called parse.php:

something: "| /usr/local/bin/parse.php"

 

In parse.php you can then use the I/O streams to read the email from STDIN. The input format is the usual email format, i.e. first the headers, then a blank line and then the body. That should be trivial enough to parse.

[Pikachu2000]

I don't pretend to know anything about this particular package, but there's a mailparse PECL extension. You can look at it and see if it might work for you.